Germany has arrested a Libyan militia leader accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes on an International Criminal Court warrant, German judicial officials and the ICC said on Friday.
Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri, who was arrested on Wednesday, allegedly served as a senior official at the notorious Mitiga prison near Tripoli, the ICC said.
"He is suspected of having committed directly himself, ordered or overseen crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, torture, rape and sexual violence" between February 2015 and early 2020, the court said in a statement.
Der Spiegel news magazine first reported that Hishri, 46, was arrested at Berlin airport as he sought to fly to Tunis, on the basis of an ICC warrant that was issued on July 10.
A spokesman for the Brandenburg regional prosecutor's office confirmed to AFP that the Libyan was arrested at the airport on Wednesday morning.
ICC registrar Osvaldo Zavala Giler thanked Germany and said such cooperative moves were "essential steps for proceedings to move forward and for victims to see justice delivered".
Oil-rich Libya is still grappling with the aftermath of the armed conflict and political chaos that followed the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled long-time dictator Moamer Kadhafi.
The country remains split between a United Nations-recognised government in Tripoli, led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, and a rival administration in the east, controlled by the Haftar family
Italy frees war crimes suspect
Human rights investigators have long decried the abuses suffered by thousands of detainees, many of them irregular migrants, in crowded and unsanitary detention facilities, including Mitiga.
Earlier this year, the Italian government sparked a heated debate over its decision to release and expel another Libyan war crimes suspect involved in running Mitiga, Osama Almasri Najim.
Najim, the head of Libya's judicial police, was arrested in Turin on January 19 on an ICC warrant, only to be released and flown home to Tripoli two days later on an Italian air force plane.
Italian Justice Minister Carlo Nordio defended his release, saying the ICC warrant for his arrest had been poorly written.
ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan said in May that the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity had accepted the court's authority to investigate alleged war crimes despite not being party to the Rome Statute, the court's founding treaty.
Khan also called on Libya's prosecutor general Al-Seddik al-Sour to arrest Najim "and surrender him to the ICC".
