“El Hishri was widely known as a notorious torturer”, deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan told the judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on May 19, at the start of three days of pre-trial hearings held to present the charges brought against the Libyan national.
Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri, also known as Al-Buti, is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Libya between May 2014 and June 2020. The charges include torture, sexual violence, enslavement, persecution, and murder. The 47-year-old is accused of being a senior commander at Mitiga prison in Tripoli, where he allegedly had general authority over the detainees, including the authority to defy the attorney general orders and direct control over the “women’s section”. The prosecutors said he was involved in the imprisonment thousands of civilians without legal basis and abused them.
According to the charges, the accused personally tortured, enslaved, sexually assaulted and murdered at least 159 detainees and instructed guards to do the same. “These were not isolated acts of rogue Mitiga prison guards. These crimes were deliberate, widespread, and systematic”, Shameem Khan told the Court.
First Libyan suspect after 15 years
El Hishri attended the hearings, sitting straight and emotionless. The accused was arrested in Germany in July 2025 and transferred to the Hague in December the same year. This followed a big blow to cooperation with the ICC when, in January 2025, Italy arrested and brought back to Libya Osama Almasri Najim, wanted by the ICC for similar acts, allegedly committed as the director of the same Mitiga prison. In January this year, the presidency of the ICC finally referred Italy to the Assembly of the States Parties for failing to cooperate.
The El Hishri hearings mark the first time in 15 years of the ICC investigation into Libya that a suspect appears before the Court. The prosecution started looking at Libya back in 2011, after the United Nations Security Council referred the situation following the attacks against civilians by the then-leader Muammar Gaddafi. 14 arrest warrants have since then been issued, including for Gaddafi, who later died, and 8 suspects remain at large.
Defence lawyer Yasser Mohamed Ahmed Hassan said that the Court does not have jurisdiction over the crimes, which his client denies. In his opening statement, he argued they are “not connected at all” to the crisis in Libya that triggered the UN referral. Hassan added that the agreement accepting the ICC jurisdiction that Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah signed in 2025 is “void”, as the Libyan law does not give him the right to sign agreements.
Khan described the case as “an important milestone”. Among the civil society observers and journalists filling the public gallery were also some victims participating to the case.
She asked the judges to confirm all the charges.
A senior member of a powerful militia
According to the prosecution, the accused was a senior member of a militia known as the “Special Deterrence Force” or “Rada”, which emerged as a Tripoli anti-Gaddafi force. It controls the Mitiga compound, a large area to the East of the city where the prison sits side by side with the group’s headquarters and the only functioning international airport in the capital. Rada’s power grew in 2015, through its affiliation with the Government of National Accord and the Presidential Council.
According to the document listing the charges, Rada carried out “widespread and systematic attacks directed against the civilian population in and around Tripoli”, especially in the Mitiga prison, where the militia “violently arrested, detained and systematically mistreated at least 5,140 persons”, women, men, girls, boys, Libyans and non-Libyans.
Many were migrants and refugees.
The 63 witnesses that provided evidence so far include “47 former Mitiga prison detainees, 2 relatives of former detainees, and 14 witnesses who are primarily relevant to the issue of jurisdiction and contextual elements of war crimes”, said prosecutor Nicole Samson. Other pieces of evidence includes “decrees, laws, and other official documents, photographs, videos, and drawings of Mitiga prison compound and of the Rada”, as well as official documents and open-source material, she described.
Besides crimes against humanity, Samson argued that war crimes were also happening, as Tripoli was plunged into an armed conflict. If not, “El Hishri and his associates could not have possessed the means, structures, or authority through which these crimes were perpetrated”. She added that some of the victims were also detained in connection with the conflict. “Some crimes were carried out to further the conflict by generating funds, extracting information, and using enslaved persons”, she said. According to one witness quoted by Samson, “detainees, including black African migrants, were forced to take part in hostilities”, while another said that El Hishri himself participated in battles at the prison when Mitiga was attacked by another armed force in 2015.
“Anyone could be arrested”
The abuse started upon arrest and “worsened during detention”, Khan told the chamber. “Anyone could be arrested, either because they were perceived as political opponents, enemies of the group or its allies, as migrants, or because their views or behaviour conflicted with the group’s beliefs, or merely because they had something that Rada wanted, be it money, properties, land or information. Many were never told why they were arrested.”
The conditions of detention were “unimaginable”, said the ICC deputy prosecutor. “Some cells were so overcrowded that detainees had to sleep on the ground in turns”. Witnesses recounted being “so crammed together that they had to lie on their sides, packed so tightly that it felt like they were sleeping in a knife position”, also Khan told the judges. Others were isolated in cells so small that they could barely move, “leading to muscle atrophy”. Food and water were scarce, and they lacked basic hygiene, leading to the spread of illnesses such as tuberculosis and HIV. El Hishri weaponised them, the prosecutor said, “by placing the detainees whom they wanted to punish in cells where they were likely to be infected.”
Detainees were tortured, and some of them died as a result. The crimes were committed by El Hishri, as well as by his co-perpetrators and by men he controlled, accused Khan. “He reprimanded the guards whom he deemed were too lenient”, she also told the Court. She read the testimony of one witness recalling that when a guard wanted to take the detainees for some exercise, El Hishri refused. “What are you doing? You are trying to help them. We are trying to make them die”, he allegedly replied.
Gendered attacks
According to the charges, in the “women’s section” of the Mitiga prison, women were shot, tortured, beaten and sexually assaulted.
The prosecutor read the testimony of a female detainee. She was cursed and the interrogators ripped her veil off. “In my culture, it is the end of a woman’s life if a man takes off her veil against her will. It showed that they could do anything they wanted with a female prisoner. I felt completely powerless and vulnerable. I felt like everything was over”.
Some of the women and girls were arrested because they were seen as having jobs or behaviours “that they viewed as inappropriate for their gender”, such as being singers or journalists or being seen at the beach or using social media, said prosecutor Dianne Luping on May 20. The accused also allegedly arrested and punished persons whose “gender identity or expression was perceived as inappropriate”, such as women and girls “perceived as being so-called manly”, or men and boys “being actually or perceived as being gay or so-called effeminate”.
64 victims are participating in the ICC case so far. The number “is by no means indicative of the scale of victimisation”, said victims’ representative Sarah Pellet. Pellet said that some did not apply because they fear for their safety as they are based in Libya. “Others are unable to do so because of the trauma they endured or because, sadly, they didn’t survive.”.
The trauma continues to this day for detainees and their families, said Pellet. She told the judges that in Libyan society, “imprisoning a woman is enough in and of itself to produce deep and long-lasting stigma”, so female victims felt that “they’d lost their honour, their family status, and in some cases their future”. The trauma “lives on in their body, in their mental health, in their ability to conceive children and in the way they’re seen in their families and their communities”, the lawyer added.
Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were also detained in Mitiga. “Their suffering is the result of structures of abuse, militia control, and international complicity”, principal counsel for victims Paolina Massidda told the Court. Many were intercepted at sea by the Libyan Coast Guards, and detained. “It was a system of enslavement, a system in which those in control exercised power akin to ownership”, said Massidda. In the words of a victim, who she quoted, “they didn’t use our names, just referred to us as slaves”.
Defence “at a substantial disadvantage”
On May 20, defence lawyer Iain Edwards took the floor. He argued the defence had been “placed at a substantial disadvantage”, as the prosecution only shared the identity of 25 out of 63 witnesses. “Not knowing the identities of most of El Hishri’s accusers, especially those who say that they have been detained at Mitiga”, he said, “made it impossible for the defence to carry out its own investigation into whether they were detained, why and when”.
In the document listing the charges, the prosecution had “very deliberately, very carefully, used the broadest and vaguest possible language”, said Edwards, so that it could “mould its case against El-Hishri, depending on how the evidence unfolds at trial. That is unfair”. He raised the fact that the charges span a period of six years as an example. This meant that his team was “not in a position to raise the existence of any alibi in any meaningful sense of the word”, he said.
The defence also asked the judges to dismiss the charge of enslavement, as it said the prosecution failed to provide enough evidence to support it. According to Edwards, the crimes also have “no sufficient nexus” to the armed conflict. Detainees were arrested “for reasons entirely unconnected with any combatant status”, and rather “on the basis of religion, sexuality, perceived moral misbehaviour, ethnicity, immigration status in Libya, and so on”. According to him, there is also no evidence that El Hishri “had any official duties associated with military matters”.
On the last day of hearings, defence lawyer Hassan argued the alleged crimes could not be characterised as crimes against humanity. “The civilian population was never a direct target of Rada”, Hassan said. “All that they did was just law enforcement operations that were legitimate and under the supervision of the Attorney General and the Ministry of Justice”.
He asked the judges to dismiss the case. The three judges panel presided by Iulia Motoc will now have 60 days to decide whether the evidence is strong enough to bring the case to trial.
