Abdullah al-Senussi central figure in three-way custody battle
Muammar Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief, who is being held in Mauritania, is also wanted by Libya and France
Monica Mark in Nouakchott
The Guardian, Fri 25 May 2012 20.25 BST
It was almost midnight on a moonlit Friday evening when a group of sleepy passengers disembarked from a plane in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott. Among them, walking with a slight stoop and dressed in the traditional flowing robes of the nomadic Tuareg people, was a sturdily built man who looked older than his 62 years, accompanied by a younger, nervous-looking man.
Within minutes, both had been whisked away by officials into a small airport building for questioning.
The following day, 17 March, the world woke up to the news that the sprawling desert country was now hosting one of the world’s most wanted men, Abdullah al-Senussi.
Senussi, a linchpin of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, had been arrested trying to enter Mauritania on a forged passport from Mali, disguised as a Tuareg. The identity and whereabouts of his young escort remain a mystery, though officials hint he was a family member.
Held in a luxury villa for 45 days under anti-terrorist laws, Gaddafi’s spy chief and brother-in-law was charged this week with entering the country on falsified documents, a crime that carries a maximum jail term of three years. The watered-down charges for a man wanted by Libya and the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, and in France for a mass murder that killed 170, came as little surprise.
“Normally, if you hold someone for 45 days, you have a serious crime to charge them with,” a senior army official told the Guardian. “Senussi has protectors in high places here.”
That shows in his preferential treatment at the Dar Naim prison, where he is now awaiting a trial date. Two cells have been equipped with “every convenience – a television and comfortable bed” for the high-profile detainee in a prison activists say “was designed to inflict maximum suffering and humiliation on its prisoners”.
Military sources also dismissed statements that 62-year-old was suffering any serious ailments, as president Mohamed Ould Abdel Azziz has stated, saying he had been hospitalised once for a few days for non-life-threatening sickness.
That such a high-profile fugitive lived unhindered in Mali and Morocco for months is evidence that few authorities wanted a Gaddafi insider on their hands. “It was known he was living in Morocco, and of course it wasn’t just a routine check [that snared him] in Mauritania,” a Mauritanian intelligence source said. To some, it is evidence that Mauritania has waded into the fraught affair at the behest of powerful allies.
As for what happens next to Gaddafi’s most brutal and loyal confidant – the intelligence officer was one of the last to flee the crumbling regime, reportedly after attempts to negotiate peace deals with rebels collapsed – rumours continue to swirl.
That Senussi was caught disguised as a Tuareg is fitting: the marginalised desert-dwellers had become ready allies of Gaddafi after he had lavished gifts on them for years. Thousands of Tuareg flocked from their traditional homelands in Niger, Chad and Mali to prop up the failing regime.
In the northern territories of Mali and Niger, signs of Libyan wealth abound. “Gaddafi put up street lamps, built roads, luxury hotels and even the airport here,” said Ali Idrissa, a Tuareg in the Agadez region that borders Libya.
Heavily armed Tuareg units had guided and protected both Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, and Senussi as their convoys fled through the Sahara desert that links Libya’s southern border with Niger and wound westward into Mali, sources in Niger told the Guardian.
In Mali, Tuaregs welcomed the fugitive. “Every person who is in the leadership of the [main rebel movements] in Mali today was close to Gaddafi,” said Balla Mahaman, a senior commander with the Mouvemement National pour la Liberation de Azawad (MNLA), which has since upended the country’s southern government.
But Senussi chose to leave after four months in the country. “Post-Gaddafi, Mali was no longer the Mali he knew,” Mahaman said.
French intelligence units spearheaded a plan to lure Senussi to Mauritania through the Me’edani tribe, one of four Mauritanian tribes that pledged allegiance to the Gaddafi regime, according to several sources in Nouakchott.
Libya has long enjoyed close links with Mauritania. Gaddafi was the first president to visit the country after President Mohamed Ould Abdel Azziz seized power in a 2008 coup, while various Mauritanian banks are seen by some opposition politicians as Libyan slush funds.
Backstage, furious diplomatic lobbying continues. With Mauritania seen by the United States in particular as a bulwark in the fight against al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Mauritania has substantial leverage, insiders say.
For now, many see Libya as the likely frontrunner in the three-way tussle. “To understand what’s happened so far and what will come next, you have to look at everything in the context of Mauritania’s close relationship with Libya,” a western diplomat said.
But while Mauritania has been hinting that the spy chief will be transferred home, no deals have been struck yet, according to a presidential aide present at meetings between the government and Libyan representatives.
“It’s a question of where will he go, not if,” the aide added.
The prospect of a trial in France might create unease in some quarters. “If he stands trial [in France] for events that happened years ago, he’s going to open his mouth. What’s to say Senussi doesn’t know the money trail and arms trail linking Gaddafi with every government in the west?” an African diplomat said.
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