* Senussi had been on the run since Libyan uprising
* Indicted for war crimes, convicted for French plane bomb
TRIPOLI, March 17 (Reuters) – Abdullah al-Senussi inspired fear and hatred among ordinary Libyans for decades as the intelligence chief, right-hand man and brother-in-law of Muammar Gaddafi before the Libyan dictator’s fall to a popular insurrection in August.
After months of speculation about his whereabouts, Mauritanian authorities arrested Senussi as he arrived at Nouakchott airport from Casablanca in Morocco, bearing a falsified Malian passport, Libyan officials said.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague indicted Senussi along with Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam last year for war crimes, citing armed attacks on civilians in anti-Gaddafi regions after the onset of the uprising in February 2011.
Mauritania has not signed the Rome Statute governing the ICC and authorities were not immediately available to comment on what they planned to do with Senussi.
Soon after the revolt blew up, media reports said that Senussi had joined then-foreign minister Moussa Koussa in defecting. The reports were later denied.
A U.S. national security official said U.S. government agencies were aware that Senussi and Saif al-Islam had been involved in making some early peace overtures to rebels but they were rejected.
ABU SALIM
A day after Saif was caught in the southern Libyan desert dressed as a Bedouin tribesman in November, Senussi was reported captured at a remote desert homestead.
However, Libyan Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib later cast doubt over the claims, saying he needed to verify the information himself before confirming it.
Senussi built up a reputation as the brutal enforcer of Gaddafi’s will when he was the chief of internal security during a deadly purge of regime opponents in the early 1980s.
Many Libyans also held Senussi responsible for the 1996 killing of some 1,200 inmates at Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison.
Senussi was a colonel in Gaddafi’s armed forces and the powerful director of Libya’s intelligence apparatus after previous posts as head of military intelligence and deputy chief of the external intelligence agency.
He was one of several Libyan officials who were convicted, in absentia, in a French court in 1999, over the bombing of a French airliner. The plane came down in Niger the previous year, killing all 170 people on board.
A leaked U.S. embassy cable from 2008 described Senussi, married to a sister of Gaddafi’s wife, as playing a “significant role” as an adviser to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi.
Senussi is a member of the Magarha tribe, believed to be the second-biggest in Libya to which Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the man convicted and jailed for helping blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, also belongs.
U.S. cables published by WikiLeaks site said Senussi asked U.S. diplomats to help smooth the way for al-Megrahi’s release from a Scottish jail, but they demurred. Megrahi was released in 2009 and returned home to a hero’s welcome.
.
