Libya: who employed the alleged mercenaries intercepted in Malta?
A photo of Malta International Airport.
Getty Images - Memitina
Text by: Houda Ibrahim Follow
4 mins
Sixteen British mercenaries on their way to Libya were therefore intercepted in Malta.
It was
Malta Today
that revealed it.
The case dates back to three weeks ago.
According to the daily, the authorities explained that they were going to take a private flight to Libya, probably to Misrata.
These former British soldiers work for the private security company of Jack Mann, one of Prince Harry's close friends in the British royal family.
Jack Mann was also part of the group himself.
Advertising
Read more
Intercepted, with his employees, Jack Mann is suspected by the Maltese police of violating the regime of restrictions imposed by the UN on arms imports and mercenary activity in Libya.
This former British officer and his colleagues first explained that they were going to provide medical and sports training in Libya.
But the police realized that their trainers' certificates were fake.
The Maltese police suspect these men arrived in dispersed order at the airport of being mercenaries.
Later, released, Maltese airspace is now prohibited for them to fly to Libya.
Jack Mann, 40, is a former British Army officer.
He served in Iraq and Afghanistan before founding, in 2015, Alma Risk, a private security company based in London.
According to its official website, this company only hires veterans of the UK military, police or other government agencies.
Jack Mann is none other than the son of Simon Mann, himself a former British officer who became a mercenary.
He was notably the mastermind of an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004.
Outstanding questions
Today, several questions remain unanswered: who employed these alleged mercenaries?
And for what purpose?
Opponents of Prime Minister Dbeibah accuse him directly.
They suspect him of agreeing to pay compensation to London, which has been demanding compensation from the Libyan state for many years for the victims of the IRA supported by Gaddafi in the 1970s.
"
There is a very strong desire on the part of Prime Minister Dbeibah
," says Global initiative researcher Jalel Harchaoui.
He's more than willing to revive cases like Lockerbie.
Why ?
Because it gives him the opportunity to make gifts, intended to be nice to the
United States, and one can be justified in thinking that the same thing is happening between Dbeibah and the United Kingdom.
Besides, it's an E
tat very closely linked to Dbeibah, great sympathy on the part of the British vis-à-vis Prime Minister Dbeibah and he seeks to prolong his survival in power, he seeks to maintain himself at all costs, it is a kind of flight ahead.
And a very important logic in this headlong rush consists in giving gifts to certain
States, including the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, of course, Great Britain and the
United States, as we have seen with the supposed extradition, which did not take place, but I think it almost took place, that of Abdallah Senoussi
”.
A Senoussi who is Gaddafi's former interior minister.
He is a suspect in the Lockerbie bombing case.
Multiple involvement in Libya
For several Libyan officials among Dbeibah's detractors, the British mercenaries had tried to go in search of documents and evidence that would relate Gaddafi's involvement in this conflict.
Dbeibah, who has argued that the Libyan state should take responsibility for crimes committed by the former Libyan regime, has already handed over to the United States last month a Libyan officer suspected of having made the bomb that caused blowing up the Panam plane over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.
This is not the first time that British servicemen have been involved in mercenary activities in Libya.
In 2020, United Nations experts published a report revealing that already in July 2019, four British mercenaries had reached the Libyan coast from Malta aboard inflatable boats.
Others arrived from Jordan by plane.
Direction Benghazi.
Employed by Marshal Haftar, the strongman of eastern Libya, they were officially to guard oil fields.
In reality, they would have come to provide him with weapons.
Due to a financial dispute, the mercenaries had to leave the country in a hurry, taking 55 million dollars without fulfilling the contract.
►Also read
: Sixteen British mercenaries on their way to Libya intercepted in Malta
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
Libya
Malta
UK
Defense