ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A U.S. choose has tossed out a collection of civil lawsuits towards a Libyan army commander who used to reside in Virginia and was accused of killing harmless civilians in that nation’s civil struggle.
At a court docket listening to Friday, U.S. District Decide Leonie Brinkema stated she had no jurisdiction to preside over a case alleging struggle crimes dedicated in Libya, despite the fact that the defendant, Khailfa Hifter, has U.S. citizenship and lived for greater than 20 years within the northern Virginia suburbs of the nation’s capital as an exile from the regime of Moammar Gadhafi.
The ruling was a big reversal of fortune for Hifter. In 2022, Brinkema entered a default judgment towards Hifter after he refused to take a seat for scheduled depositions about his position within the preventing that has plagued the nation during the last decade.
However Hifter retained new legal professionals who persuaded the choose to reopen the case and made Hifter accessible to be deposed. He sat for 2 separate depositions in 2022 and 2023 and denied orchestrating assaults towards civilians.
As soon as a lieutenant to Gadhafi, Hifter defected to the U.S. through the Nineteen Eighties. He’s broadly believed to have labored with the CIA throughout his time in exile.
He returned to Libya in 2011 to help anti-Gadhafi forces that revolted towards the dictator and killed him. Throughout the nation’s civil struggle, he led the self-styled Libyan Nationwide Military, which managed a lot of the japanese half of Libya, with help from international locations together with Russia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. He continues to carry sway within the japanese half of the nation.
Within the lawsuits, first filed in 2019, the plaintiffs say relations had been killed by army bombardments carried out by Hifter’s military in civilian areas.
The lawsuits additionally alleged that Hifter and his household owned a big quantity of property in Virginia, which might have been used to repay any judgment that may have been entered towards him.
Whereas the lawsuits had been tossed out on technical points over jurisdiction, certainly one of Hifter’s legal professionals, Paul Kamenar, stated Hifter denied any position within the deaths of civilians.
“He’s not this ruthless determine that everybody needs to painting him as,” Kamenar stated in a telephone interview Sunday.
Faisal Gill, a lawyer for plaintiffs in one of many three lawsuits that Brinkema tossed out Friday, stated he plans to enchantment the dismissal.
Mark Zaid, lawyer for one more set of plaintiffs, known as Brinkema’s ruling perplexing and stated he believes that the court docket’s jurisdiction to listen to the case had already been established at an earlier section of the case.
“A U.S. citizen dedicated struggle crimes overseas and so far has escaped civil accountability,” Zaid stated Sunday in an emailed assertion.
In court docket papers, Hifter tried to say immunity from the fits as a head of state. At one level, the choose put the instances on pause as a result of she anxious that the lawsuits had been getting used to affect scheduled presidential elections in Libya, through which Hifter was a candidate. These elections had been later postponed.
Matthew Barakat, The Related Press
