Libyan rebels face test dealing with pro-Gadhafi suspects

http://www.stripes.com/news/libyan-rebels-face-test-dealing-with-pro-gadhafi-suspects-1.153534
the problem is xenophobia against black Africans among the rebels, says Diana Eltahawy, a researcher for Amnesty International. “They’ve made the problems worse by saying in various interviews that black mercenaries were responsible for the worst abuses against the civilian population, like rapes and mass killings,” Eltahawy said, referring to the rebels. “A lot of these reports were widely exaggerated, especially the rapes.” http://1.usa.gov/rsftb0

With no centralized control of the rebels who’ve poured into Tripoli, often without direct orders to come here, there is widespread worry about the potential for atrocities. Already there is suspicion that many of the dead who lay strewn about the capital in recent days were the victims of execution, not fighting.
At the hospital in Abu Salim, a district that fell to the rebels on Friday, at least 100 bodies were found by medical staff when they arrived at the facility. At least two had been shot in their beds, both apparent members of Gadhafi’s military. The other bodies were in such a state of decomposition it was not immediately clear how or when they had died, and there was no way to know immediately who had fired the fatal shots.
At a traffic circle near Gadhafi’s Bab al Aziziya headquarters complex, at least two dozen bodies of Gadhafi soldiers were found also on Friday. Many were in their tents, without shoes, as if they’d been asleep. One was shot in the back of an ambulance. Another had been killed on a hospital gurney, an intravenous drip still embedded in his arm.

There was also concern that suspicion was falling disproportionately on black Africans, up to a million of whom had worked in Libya before the revolution. At one police station, the commander, Saleh Mohammed, said only one of the 45 prisoners he held had carried an ID card that linked him to a pro-Gadhafi militia. Thirty of the prisoners were citizens of other African countries, however.
Diana Eltahawy, a researcher for Amnesty International, the prisoners’ rights group, said xenophobia had long been a problem in Libya.
“They’ve made the problems worse by saying in various interviews that black mercenaries were responsible for the worst abuses against the civilian population, like rapes and mass killings,” Eltahawy said, referring to the rebels. “A lot of these reports were widely exaggerated, especially the rapes.”

“We have many crimes from these Africans,” Fathi Mohamed added. “We can’t trust anyone. We have to clean up Libya. Some of them are innocent. Some of them are laborers. They can go back to work.”

“In each battle, we took prisoners. If they died, we buried them,” said Salem Mohamed Ismail, the commander of a rebel unit from Misrata that was one of the first to enter Tripoli and participated in heavy fighting last week.
Ismail said his unit had taken hundreds of prisoners during the fighting, but refused to say where they had been sent after their capture.
Eltahawy, the Amnesty International researcher, said she’d had difficulty determining how many prisoners the rebels held.