The Government Authority for the Search for Missing Persons in Libya said that it had discovered a new mass grave in the general rubbish dump in the city of Tarhuna, southeast of the capital, Tripoli, and said - yesterday, Sunday - that the operations of extracting the remains from it will begin today.
Earlier, this authority said that it had recovered 18 unidentified bodies from the Sabaa area in the city of Sirte, in the center of the country.
She stated that her teams took samples of the bones after presenting them to forensic medicine, to transfer them to the commission’s laboratories to identify the owners of the bodies whose remains were found, and compare them with samples of the missing persons in the commission’s laboratories.
The Search for Missing Persons Authority in Libya stated that its teams reburied the unidentified bodies after they were recovered.
Forces affiliated with retired Major General Khalifa Haftar are accused of being responsible for the existence of mass graves during their control of Tarhuna between April 2019 and June 2020, which these forces deny is true.
The beginning of it
Since June 2020, the government tracing authority has been discovering mass and individual graves in Tarhuna, and exhuming unidentified bodies and remains.
Last November, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, visited Libya for a week at the head of an official delegation.
From Tripoli, Karim Khan - at the end of his visit - gave a briefing to the UN Security Council, in which he said that he was obtaining evidence related to crimes allegedly committed by groups linked to Haftar's forces in Tarhuna, including mass graves.