The Site that Asks: Is the "dictator" justifying intervention by killing innocents? Or is someone else doing it for him? (previously The Libyan Civil War: Critical Views)
Warning
Warning: This site contains images and graphic descriptions of extreme violence and/or its effects. It's not as bad as it could be, but is meant to be shocking. Readers should be 18+ or a mature 17 or so. There is also some foul language occasionally, and potential for general upsetting of comforting conventional wisdom. Please view with discretion.
Showing posts with label identifying the dead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label identifying the dead. Show all posts
We have just learned our celebrity faker Dr. al-Farjani has lost his perch helping the NTC figure out who killed who. His much-mentioned (by him) national commission for missing persons recently suffered a mysterious cancellation. Perhaps the problems first publicized here - his activities posing as a witness and coaching other witnesses to create the "facts" he was tasked with finding - contributed. Perhaps they were unrelated. No explanation has been publicly offered.
Previously, we outlined his late-2011 rise to authority in "Free Libya" and attainment of global recognition as the co-chair (and sometimes Deputy chairman) of the highly-relevant-sounding commission. As of mid-February he was mentioned not as a co-chair or deputy chair of anything, but rather “journalist Salem al-Farjani.” He told the Magharebia news service, one year after the civil war was begun, “it was the first time Libya had an occasion to celebrate” and he hoped “that the souls of martyrs won't go in vain.” Same guy? Major qualification just not mentioned?
In mid-March, he was scheduled to give a speech in Geneva sponsored by Swiss group TRIAL (Track Impunity Always). In the interests of holding war criminals accountable, they decided to host “a privileged meeting with Dr. Salem Alferjani, forensic scientist and human rights activist and former Deputy Chairman of the Commission for Missing Persons in Libya,” speaking on “Identifying the Missing: Truth and Accountability in Post-Gaddafi Libya.” [TR] The possible liar and absolver of rebel war criminals was called an esteemed expert in how truth and justice relate to each other.
“With the support of Dr. Salem Alferjani, forensic scientist and human rights activist, TRIAL called for a temporary halt to all excavations… […] Dr. Salem Alferjani has been the Deputy-Chairman of the Commission for Missing Persons in Libya, which was in charge of the exhumation and identification […] Despite the premature dissolution of the Commission, Dr. Alferjani is convinced that the disclosure of the truth regarding these mass graves is the only way to provide the victims’ families with a minimum of justice, thus he is still engaged in the identification of the victims of human rights violations in Libya.”
The truth does in FACT underpin justice, noble convictions aside. That is why he was there from the beginning helping seed lies about the shed massacre, to ensure the rebel/NTC/NATO thugs were NOT held accountable, and loyalists were convicted.
There might be a temptation to write off the whole issue of “See-through Saelm’s” apparent deceit. Engendering that temptation might have been the very idea behind shutting his operation down. However, he and his baggage remain relevant in three important ways.
1) Even besides lectures, the man is still at work, at least according to TRIAL, who related his activities after the Commission’s unexplained end:
“Currently, Dr. Alferjani works together with several local and international NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red Cross. He is also an important focal point in Libya for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno-Ocampo and the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki Moon.”
2) His past work hasn’t disappeared. He touched much (and many) while in charge, shaping a case that might be entirely bogus, a case which in all likelihood stands unchanged.
3) He might be a rare window into how these things work. It does Libya and the Truth no good if someone as deceitful as Dr. al-Farjani is shunted aside and replaced with someone just as crooked but less obvious about it.
I have an old Lockerbie research friend, Eddie, to thank for this tip and the intital research, to which I (and then contributors, via comments here) added a lot. It was thanks to my work he saw the significance when he stumbled across this character Dr. Salem al-Farjani. In two important ways this man may be relevant to our understanding of the mysterious massacres across the capitol in August and September.
First, an Associated Press Article by Vanessa Gera, December 10, explains al Farjani's relevance in "liberated Libya" as a big wheel in the NTC's search for the war's missing and unidentified. He's to specialize in the names without bodies and bodies without names, anonymous corpses in mass graves, from both sides but especially rebel people, since Gaddafi loyalists were the evil killer side. In part, his job will likely be to help the NTC put acceptable identities on the victims of massacres carried out by their own forces - disappearing loyalists, replacing them with more martyrs, made-up if need be, and more black paint for the past.
The governing National Transitional Council has founded a national commission to deal with the matter [of the thousands reported missing]. It is headed by al-Farjani, a cardiac surgeon, and a DNA specialist, Othman Abdul-Jalil [sic].
The DNA part of this "National Missing Persons Commission" can be quite helpful if done right, and I have no cause to doubt the credibility of his co-chair, actually named Dr. Mohamed Othman. But Dr.al Farjani, as we'll see, has known issues.
Dr. Salem's audition for his part of the job, as Gera describes it, was an insurgency-long, life-and-family-endangering, one-man fact-finding mission. On about February 20, “bodies of protesters that were brought to his sprawling 1,200-bed Tripoli Medical Center were seized by Gadhafi forces before their families could recover them." This fiendish behavior has been widely alleged, but never well illustrated. The doc plans to change that, and has for nearly a year now been taking careful note of the cartoonish villainy, even going outside the hospital on "fact-finding missions to the sites of suspected massacres or mass graves."
Did he take one of these trips, on August 27, to the Yarmouk military base south of town, site of a likely rebel massacre a few days earlier?
Field Work
Now for what the guy looks like, which-aside from the "Dr." part and "Salim" part, and proximity to massacres part, is what caught Eddie's attention: The photograph used in that article was also cited in a news blurb: “In this Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011 photo, Dr. Salem al-Farjani, 43, speaks to a militia member as they stand in front of photos of men who went missing during Libya's civil war.” The photograph (cropped view below) shows a man who looks rather similar to another Tripoli-based Dr. Salim/Salem, who spoke to several media outlets in late August about a massacre he treaveled to the site of - though not far, he says.
The largest mass-killing allegation of all, over 150 people killed with guns and grenades, the alleged Khamis Brigade shed massacre with too many witnesses including himself, was right by this doctor's house south of Tripoli, he says. He saw it all happen, he told Agence France-Presse (AFP), Sky News, Anthony Loyd, Human Rights Watch, Liberation, perhaps the New York Times and even more, depending.
The facial similarity between the two is not overwhelming at all, but it is there. On closer inspection (keep reading), it gets better. I see the same distinct hairline, same eyebrows and eyelids, muscular, furrowed brows shading his eyes. I see a consistent long nose, cheeks, chin, and ears. He seems to have lost about ten pounds and grown in his beard between the two images. He could have more of a tan now as well, but the washed-out video (lightened more here) is not too clear. The taste in shirt colors is consistent enough too, if not any major clue.
Faces aside, recall that both men shown above are massacre-obsessed or massacre-witnessing, rebel-assisting Tripoli doctors named Salim/Salem (as given, anyway). What stands in the way of linking the two as one is the different last name, and that we have no reason to believe that Dr. Salim al-Farjani, one of the NTC's top massacre-solving and ID-deciding people, is such a total faker. Other than the fact that he may have been caught faking, known reason or not.
But faces not aside, two further images from between his Fat Elvis and Thin Elvis pahses show the transition. Felix found a valuable Youtube video that sinks it.
لقاء مع الدكتور سالم الفرجاني عضو اللجنة الوطنية للتعرف على هويات ضحايا حرب التحرير
[auto-translate: "A meeting with Dr. Salem Ferjany member of the National Committee to get to know the identities of the victims of the war of liberation"]
It was posted October 1, so presumably from shortly before that date. I had hoped a video would reveal enough of his voice to make a clear match, but in fluent Arabic Dr. Salem sounds little like Dr. Salim in his halting, funny-sounding English. The raw video is a bit too dark to be sure, but with enhancement (adjustment of "levels" in Photoshop - is that "gamma?" -may have over-done it, sorry), the man's face is uncanny in its similarity to Rajip's, as opposed to his own about two months later.
As a nail in the coffin goes, contributor Petri Krohn notes (in the comments here), and the image above confirms, both men have a distinctive gap in their lower teeth, apparently just left of center (our right). I suspect that upon seeing something, perhaps the October video, someone alerted the doctor how much he resembled the guy on the news. It was perhaps this that spurred him to start jogging heavily and to stop shaving, in the hopes no one else would notice.
More images: Dr. Rajub speaking to AFP, late in the afternoon, from a Spanish-dubbed broadcast. Tooth gap visible here too. Note the blue alligator shirt Dr. Rajub wears here, as when speaking to Sky News earlier (above).
Interesting then, as if we needed it at this point, is Dr. al-Farjani wearing the same shirt, when speaking about the "more than 1,700" prison massacre, on September 26. From an Al Arabiya video. He's starting a mustache it seems, suggesting the October 1 video was some days or weeks old as it was posted.
The Doctor's Dad
The Gera article metions how with even his wife out of the loop, the doctor's "only confidant was his father, who would travel with him on fact-finding missions to the sites of suspected massacres or mass graves. He hoped the presence of a 70-year-old man would make him seem less suspicious to Gadhafi’s men."
Survivor Fathallah Abdullah
- the doctor's dad?
It is noteworthy that among the too-many alleged miraculous escapees, there is one rather toothsome 70-year-old man who turned up at the massacre site and spoke with Bild (Germany) and BBC. This was on August 27, as "Dr. Salim Rajub" was there. He was named Fathallah Abdullah al Ashter, as given, and said he escaped but lost his three sons in the onslaught, none of them named Salem or Salim. It could be true, I suppose.
Further Adventures of See-Through Salem
See-Through Salem: "Dr.Salim" Speaks, Coach Salem Manages
The man called Rajub, on Aug. 27: What he said, to whom, and how he interacted with the other "witnesses," as seen on camera. Plenty of speculation, but no shortage of decent evidence to support it. Was he the puppet master here?
A "Dr. Salim," a "Mr. al Farjani, and a Key Escapee.
The link "Dr. Rajub" showed in apparently coaching escapee witness Atiri/el Hitri brings to point the question whether the Dr. is also Mr. Ahmed al Farjani, who says he sheltered the escapee. This, the el Hitri link, and their teamwork on getting this story to the International Criminal Court are explored here.
Al Farjani Hits the Big Time
Ramsay and Loyd and perhaps Worth were only the start for Dr. al Farjani's clandestine "fact-finding" missions at the Yarmouk shed. Within a month he was in the government's committees to solve massacres, and by November he was returning again and again to the massacre site with more influential people yet. On November 3, it was UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. On the 23rd, it was ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. The last has a video finally with the tour guide, wearing a jacket if not a tie, speaking in Dr, Rajub's English.
See-Through Salem Arrested?
It seems so, at Tripoli Medical Center, and he was carrried away by armed men. The details of why, by whom, and what next remain unclear.
Standing Questions / Troubling Implications
If he's not able to skate through with arguments that he didn't lie, what are the proper charges for the Libyan people to file for this crime against reality? Because behind this apparent deceit is a likely rebel massacre it was designed to conceal, and in front of it is the very real danger that the good doctor was hired to do much more of the same.
So ... Dr. Salem al-Farjani wants to help since “people are suffering. They want to know the fate of their loved ones.” There are families attached to the approximately 150-180 government soldiers and/or civilian others, many alleged "mercenary" types, who were apparently slaughtered at or near the Yarmouk military base. They never turned up acknowledged as captive, dead, or alive, though some said they "fled like rats" to nowhere in particular. From the timeline clues, one could fairly surmise that they were killed at their stations by NATO bombs and/or the Misrata Brigades, before the latter started burning their corpses after capturing the brutalized base late on the 23rd - the specified date of the massacre (see the link, entry "Wednesday, 6:15 am").
Will Dr. Farjani be helping solve that one, after fire has erased the best direct clues who the victims really were? After Dr. Rajub went there and pretended to see the vanishing soldiers themselves kill the same number of perhaps invented 'rebular' Libyan guys? After two dozen uninjured escapees, partly shepherded by the doctor, swore they escaped somehow from as many different versions of the massacre?
Our subject alleged regime use of acid to erase clues - fire was known to be used to erase clues at Yarmouk, and the rebels were apparently in control when the fire was set. Dr. al-Farjani might have been there when the cover-story was inserted in the place of those lost clues. He may have helped seed the lie himself, in a fact-making mission to a massacre site. And he even says Libya "won’t have reconciliation" until his work is enshrined in the nation's new legal history.
I must say this closing line from from the Gera piece is extremely reassuring as to how his commission will perform:
Officials stress that they want to help find the missing on all sides.
“We don’t discriminate,” said Hatem el-Turki, the head of the Libyan Society of the Missing.
Shortly after he visited the Khamis Brigade massacre shed, put on his "Dr. Salim Rajub" performance for the world's media (and helped the survivors put on their own), Dr. Salem al Farjani was hired by the interim NTC government. Perhaps specifically to repeat the feat more officially and nationwide, he was made co-chairman and sometimes acting chairman of the National Missing Persons Commission, dedicated to finding which of the dead and missing were Gaddafi regime victims. Judging by his performances so far, he will probably help find that all of them were.
Just when he took on this role is not entirely clear. But less than a month after his Rajub act, on September 25, he was speaking as a member of the government committee to prove the long-alleged regime atrocity of the "Abu Salim Prison massacre." He expressed certainty that the non-human bones found near the prison in August were of the alleged 1,270 victims (or "more than 1,700," as he rounded the number up).
(to be fixed-up later)
A recent Associated Press Article by Vanessa Gera, December 10, mentions al-Farjani's relevance in "liberated Libya." He's a big wheel in the NTC's search for the war's missing and unidentified, the anonymous corpses in mass graves, from both sides but especially rebel people, since Gaddafi loyalists were the evil killer side. In part, his job will likely be to put acceptable identities on the victims of massacres carried out by their own forces - disappearing loyalists, replacing them with more martyrs, made-up if need be, and more black paint for the past.
The governing National Transitional Council has founded a national commission to deal with the matter [of the thousands reported missing]. It is headed by al-Farjani, a cardiac surgeon, and a DNA specialist, Othman Abdul-Jalil [sic].
The DNA part of this "National Missing Persons Commission" can be quite helpful if done right, and I have no cause to doubt the credibility of his co-chair, actually named Dr. Mohamed Othman. But something tells me this is added just to sound fancy and lend finality to decisions made in other ways, with a careful system of endemic sample mix-ups. True science will likely have little effect on the process, aside from the sheen of hard science. Dr. Salem's audition for his part of the job, as Gera describes it, was an insurgency-long, life-and-family-endangering, one-man fact-finding mission. On about February 20, “bodies of protesters that were brought to his sprawling 1,200-bedTripoli Medical Center were seized by Gadhafi forces before their families could recover them." This fiendish behavior has been widely alleged, but never well illustrated. The doc plans to change that, and has for nearly a year now been taking careful note of the cartoonish villainy, even going outside the hospital on "fact-finding missions to the sites of suspected massacres or mass graves." As Eddie noted, the good doctor has to have seen a lot of the same shady things we have - probable rebel crimes pinned transparently on the villified, whipping-boy regime. He doesn't seem to have noticed, if so.
The surgeon took down the names of as many slain fighters as he could before they were hauled off by Moammar Gadhafi’s forces, presumably to be buried in mass graves. He concealed his files at home, hiding his activities even from his wife because of fears of retaliation by the regime.
Now the evidence he gathered is helping Libya’s new leadership as it intensifies a search for fighters who went missing in the war. The uncertainty over their fate is adding to the grievances in a land still traumatized by the dictator’s long rule and lingering tensions between those who supported him and revolutionary forces.
“We won’t have reconciliation in the country if we don’t take care of this,”al-Farjani said. “People are suffering. They want to know the fate of their loved ones.” [VG]
The Gera article notes how there is no firm estimate even of how many went missing, from both/all sides combined, during the course of this war the rebels started and NATO escalated.
Al-Farjani believes there could be 25,000 people still missing -- though part of his mission is to confirm a more precise figure. International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo put the possible total at around 20,000. Many political and army leaders have refused to give estimates, saying it will take time to determine the scope of the problem.
Salim al-Farjani, a member of the committee set up to identify the remains, appealed for international help.
“We call on foreign organizations and the international community to help us in this task of identifying the remains of more than 1,700 people,” said Farjani.
“We were invited to visit the place where the corpses of the prisoners at Abu Salim were found, where we saw scattered human bones,” he said.
Farjani also referred to “egregious acts committed against dead bodies, on which acid was poured to eliminate any evidence of this massacre.” [AA]
I had wondered where the 1,270 (a highly suspect number itself) had become, as sometimes reported, 1,700 (or "more than" that). It seems our friend and detective Dr. Salem might be the origin. Last we heard, the bones seen on the surface werenot human, per the only people there qualified to even guess, and it has still, to my knowledge, never been exhumed (see here for details).
And Discussion of the "Facebook Witnesses" January 22, 2012 (incomplete, last updates Feb. 6)
The following is a rush posting to prevent a flood of comments at the wrong post(s). Those that belong here, can now go beneah this post, and my own starters can go in it.
A New York "Human Rights" Campaign
Early report to Amnesty, HRW and others later, mass media help saturating the global public with the rebel version of "what happened at Yarmouk."
Then with time to be more scholarly, Physicians for Human Rights failed anyway in late November with their PHR shed massacre report
A Social Media Campaign
Petri Krohn alerts me:
In fact there is a whole Facebook page dedicated to the Yarmouk prison massacre: مجزرة معتقل اليرموك http://www.facebook.com/alyermok We also have the Association of families of victims of the Holocaust Guantanamo Yarmuk [!!] – رابطة اهالى ضحايا محرقة معتقل اليرموك http://www.facebook.com/rabta2011
I'm having problems with these pages, where I can read for a little while until it tells me I need to log in. I don't really want to, but I will try again later when I'm signed in and see if it lets me look around then.
This gives us a new alleged escapee, "Mahmoud Mukhtar (Or Mukhtar Mahmoud) Zadam" ("مختار محمود الزدام"), who was also named, perhaps as the baseball-cap-wearing central speaker in this August video featuring other known alleged survivors (which I did not know 'til the other day). It's entitled (translated) "Survivors of the massacre of the Yarmouk camp telling details of the massacre." Here on the Facegook group's page, Petri found, he's mentioned, and the first part of his saga related. Translated from Arabic:
Mahmoud Mukhtar Zadam, born in 1988, a resident of the city of Zliten, was arrested on Friday, 6/17/2011 AD. Mokhtar was arrested by some of the volunteers in the city of Zliten, with some of his cousins for being a family Zadam, which was attended by some of her children in the events of June 9
Some others I found searching for "escaped" and "survivor" (in Arabic) on these pages: http://ar-ar.facebook.com/notes/الشبكة-الليبية-للإعلام-the-libyan-network-of-media/قصة-محرقة-اليرموك-والنجاة-من-جحيم-المعتقل/243672759037799 (Later moved, pulled, or permission to view denied) "Said Mahmoud Falba a survivor of the Holocaust, which [happened at] Yarmouk camp, 32nd brigade ... the story of the Holocaust from the hell of prison escape..."
By the photo, he's the sad faced man in the Yarmouk video, who walks with a cane, and hobnobs with Sabri Tabbal. He sounds like a (claimed) onetime prisoner, rather than an escapee of the actual massacre, from what I could translate. He worked for Sun Microsystems, and found many co-workers imprisoned too, for suspicion of helping NATO bomb their country. (can anyone re-locate the page? I didn't get the photo)
Hisham Al Taher al-Sari [mast], a survivor of the massacre of Yarmouk .... Zliten ... Date of arrest 18 \ 8 \ 2011 has been arrested after storming into the house in a non-moral ... Check-out 23 \ 8 \ 2011 ... Of people who know them in prison Yarmouk gift Ahmidan .. Issam Ahbich ... Hakim large Tripoli ... A.-M. donkeys ...
And finally, translated,"The names of some of the survivors of massacre Guantanamo Yarmuk" http://ar-ar.facebook.com/rabta2011/posts/217335248332204http://ar-ar.facebook.com/rabta2011/posts/217335248332204
Proceed with a list of 40 Arabic names... Have at it, anyone. Should be fun, so I'll leave it others. How many we already had on the witness list? Not many, I'd guess... (I peeked - there are several, but many, many new names) "This list is not final," it says, in anticipation of more survivors to be found. I don't think all of these even claim to have escaped the actual massacre. The list is reproduced and partly translated/transliterated, in comments below, by contributor Petri. Thanks, Petri, for that.
Update Feb. 6: In the comments below is a great working analysis of the Facebook list of 40, a separate claim that 41 witnesses from Zliten alone (no names given) managed to escape the massacre and live to tell. Another witness account emerges, 16/17-year-old escapee Tahir Ahmed el-Bahbah, who supports el-Hitri on the guard Abdul Razak (though with the maner of a different named guard, analysis forthcoming), and names three cousins (same last name) arrested with him, two of which apparently escaped, both listed along with him on the list of 40 survivors.
The final fall of the Gaddafi-led resistance, the final "liberation"of Libya and the widely-heralded start of a fresh new chapter there, only was declared upon the still-murky capture and murder of Muammar Gaddafi on October 20. This itself happened amid the culmination of Rebel/NTC/al Qaeda barbarity that rode shotgun on NATO-enforced "Humanitarian" intervention. Let us now take a look at the bloody climax in Sirte of the effort to, as was first explained, "avert a bloodbath in Benghazi."
Past the intro, I'm not ready to tackle this post. I will soon be copying over the info I already have published on the mass grave(s) of hundreds of victims of the city's final liberation. The various reports, changing number of those interned, the gruesome photos of many of them, the clues held therein, etc.
In the meantime, if anyone has anything they think I might not, feel free to leave it in a comment, and save me some time.
Rebel/NTC types are obsessed with a huge list of names they have of missing people feared killed by Gaddafi people, a mammoth pile of unclaimed loyalist corpses resulting from their joint victory with NATO nations, and a desire to find a plausible sounding way to match the two.
But problems will be glossed over. Most of the alleged Gaddafi victims we've seen are black-skinned, whereas the missing that the new government concerns itself with seem by all sources to be almost totally light-skinned Arabs. And there are always valid question of whose custody the dead were last in.
Sometimes it can be proven that a supposed Gaddafi victim was actually a loyalist or suspected one known to have been detained by rebel forces.
The primordial example is the "al Baida massacre," where someone in the Libyan media (ignored) noticed the same exact black man with a hunched back and distinctive sweater, and other probable matches, among two distinct groups of people troubled in February. One video showed nine captured soldiers and suspect "mercenaries" sentenced to die by Islamist rebel fighters. Another later video shows some of these among 22 soldier-types (out of 300 total) killed by their own officers (or by mercenaries) for refusing to shoot innocent protesters.
I might explore the idea and its applications here a bit further, but for now wanted to open it up for any possible match like that anyone has made that hasn't already been done somewhere else. If it's a good enough guess to warrant ruling out at the least, bring it here. The emphasis is on visual proof, but if you have good enough reason, more circumstantial evidence can be called on to establish rebel control over people later found brutally executed.
Or submit excellent matching work that has been done already. The stuff out of Sirte, with the mass grave photos to work off of, has been quite fruitful in proving rebel war crimes the West cares not one iota about.
The Man/Men in Orange
I'll start with a possible match I noticed recently. First, a black man captured in Tripoli, Abu Salim I would guess. Date unsure, but I'd guess Aug. 23 or 24. He certainly looks worried about the foreshadowing these guys are giving him.
Image found on this page full of many, many, other fascinating scenes like it, some quite shocking but none gory. Details and credits unknown.
The dead black guy in the background is interesting too. These should be and eventually will be added to the Roundabout area victims list, along with a few others I've discovered since last update.
The orange "tank top," general skin tone (it can lighten with decay or darken), general build, and history all suggest this could well be the same guy. Cause of death uncertain, but these victims seem to have died largely by the sword, not the bullet. Most seem to be activists camping there, but it's not impossible "mercenary"-looking people (sporty clothes seem to help) would be killed and brought here to be seen as "Gaddafi fighters."
The first image might be from a video. If that's so, and anyone can find it, I'd like to see more. Do we see the captive's right wrist? Back of his head? The main problem I have is the tall hair we can see on top vs. the victim's, appropriately curly but buzzed short all the way to the top, it seems (not so clear here, but I have an enhancement I might share). But it might get tall only at the front, unseen here.
December 22, 2011 (incomplete, rough draft/outline)
The NTC Commission
The Rebel NTC ("Libyan government") has created a National Missing Persons Commission," tasked with matching names of the missing (some perhaps fictitious) to bodies of the unidentified (primarily loyalists), and thus suggesting who killed whom nationwide,
It's partially headed by one Dr. Salim al-Ferjani of Tripoli Medical Center, a hotbed of rebel medical propaganda. He's already surfaced under a false name (Dr. Salem Rajub) as a false witness to a disputed incident with uncertain identities involved (see the previous link). He decided from what he "saw" that Gaddafi loyalists had killed the roughly 150 captives of the Khamis Brigade shed massacre. Under his other name, al Farjani showed the site of that incident to UNSG Ban Ki Moon on November 3, where they gave him as "the acting Chairperson" of the commission.
Mentioned in late November as jointly heading the commission with Farjani was a DNA specialist, Othman Abdul-Jalil. [VG] The DNA part of this "National Missing Persons Commission" can be quite helpful if done right, and I have no cause to doubt Dr. Abdul-Jalil's ability. But something tells me this is added just to sound fancy, and will have little effect on the process, besides sometimes giving it a sheen of hard science.
[Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib] will head a 24-member government which will include such portfolios as the ministry of martyrs, wounded and missing people, and a ministry of civilian society.
The Libyan Society of the Missing
Facebook logo and website
header for Libyan Society of
the [Rebel] Missing. Loyalists welcome to type in their info as well... but they might not.
Hatem el-Turki, head. El-Turki said loyalists wouldbe fairly identified too, in the search for justice." We don't discriminate." [VG]
Petri Krohn comment, 12/16 The one person mentioned in the article that is trivially easy to find is Hatem el-Turki, the head of the Libyan Society of the Missing. He has a Facebook page that again links to the Facebook page of the society. Their official web page is at www.missing.ly
Other Comments Felix comment, 12/17: This YouTube video,NATO and Libya: The search for missing relatives in Tripoli, Libya (w/subtitles) uploaded 11 October shows someone called Muhammed Hatem Musbah from the Community for Missing People(almost zero internet presence in English for it or the interviewee) uploaded by NATOchannelTV (er..) it also mentions the Libyan Society of the Missing. "There seems to be too many missing people organisations working independently of any official authority" (hence the near zero success rate)
Petri Krohn comment, 12/21: There is an important point noted by Mohammad Miloud Benhammed, the vice president of the Mitiga missing persons group on this Russia Today video. Families of dead Libyan Army soldiers and other Gaddafi supporters will claim that their relatives were "civilians caught in the crossfire" – this when speaking to the only neutral party in Libya. With a little pushing and some help from a Massacre Masseuse any dead Gaddafista can be turned into a revolutionary martyr. Who would want to be related to a dead servant of a dead tyrant when a far better afterlife is on offer as an icon of the revolution.
