CIA and MI6 ‘handed suspects to Gaddafi regime’

Human rights investigators claim to have found documentary evidence in Libya that the CIA and Britain’s MI6 handed suspected Islamist militants to the Gaddafi regime for torture.

Human Rights Watch say they found the evidence in Tripoli, in the office of the former secret service chief and foreign minister Moussa Koussa.

The practice of secretly sending terror suspects to a third party country for interrogation was practiced by the US under President George W Bush.

Peter Bouckaert from Human Rights Watch said: “The CIA rendered eight or nine individuals according to these files and it wasn’t just abducting suspected Islamic militants and handing them over to the Libyan intelligence. The CIA also sent questions they wanted Libyan intelligence to ask and from the files it’s very clear they were present in some of the interrogations themselves.”

The apparent cosiness between the US, Britain and the Gaddafi regime could raise friction with the new administration.

Koussa is currently in exile in London.

Human Rights Watch also claims the rebel commander now in charge of the capital Tripoli, Abdel Hakim Belhadj, was secretly handed to Gaddafi’s torturers by the United States in 2004.

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