Three BBC employees flew out of Libya last night after being locked up and beaten by Colonel Gaddafi’s security services and meeting tortured opponents of the regime.
Before leaving Tripoli Chris Cobb-Smith, Goktay Koraltan, a Turk, and Feras Killani, a Palestinian refugee with Syrian citizenship, gave an account of their ordeal inside the military’s high-walled barracks which will fuel international outrage at Colonel Gaddafi’s brutal efforts crush the uprising.
They were hooded and handcuffed. They described beatings, mock executions and encounters with detainees whose faces had been “mashed” and ribs broken. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of opposition activists have been abducted in recent days and not seen again.
Their treatment also exposes the hollowness of the regime’s promise to allow foreign journalists to operate freely in Libya. Those journalists are the last source of independent information from Libya, and many have been detained in recent days though none have suffered as badly.
The BBC Arabic team and their Libyan driver were arrested on Monday afternoon at a checkpoint south of the rebel-held town of Zawiya. Their cameras and mobile telephones were removed, and they were taken to a nearby barracks.
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A senior officer picked on Mr Killani because he was a Palestinian, saying Hamas had not supported Colonel Gaddafi. “When I tried to respond he took me out to the car park behind the guard room. Then he started hitting me without saying anything. First with his fist, then boots, then knees,” said Mr Killani, who believes the officer knew he had covered the violent suppression of protests in the eastern Tripoli district of Tajoura the previous Friday.
The team was driven to Tripoli with a guard pointing an AK-47 at them. They were taken to a scruffy compound behind another barracks, arriving shortly before dark. Mr Cobb-Smith and Mr Koraltan were locked in a metal cage while the soldiers hit Mr Killani with their AK-47s.
“I was down on my knees and I heard them cocking their guns. I thought they were going to shoot me. It was a fake execution,” he said.
Mr Killani was put in concrete room with an iron door. He was hooded and cuffed and beaten again as he lay on the floor. “They were saying I’m a spy working for British intelligence,” he said. Mr Cobb-Smith and Mr Koraltan could hear his screams.
Later they too were hooded and handcuffed, and taken to Mr Killani’s cell. “We saw Feras bent double, lying on the floor, face swollen, obviously in pain,” said Mr Cobb-Smith. “I was really scared…I thought they were going to kill us and blame al-Qaeda or the rebels,” said Mr Koraltan.
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The men were kept in the compound most of the night, with no food, water or access to toilets, and could hear the screams of people being tortured.
A young man from Zawiya was brought in. “He was terrified. He prayed all night. He peed himself,” said Mr Cobb-Smith. “The guards kept coming in, screaming at him, terrorising him…The guards were also making throat slitting gestures to all of us.”
Mr Killani shared the cage with a dozen other detainees. Some said they had been arrested because their phone calls had been intercepted – including ones to foreign media. Some had broken ribs. He lifted the hoods of others to find their faces badly beaten. They said they had been tortured for three days, and “where they were now was like heaven compared to where they had been”.
At 3am the three men and their driver were put in a truck with about 20 other detainees. “They were so badly beaten, and it was so full, that every time you moved someone screamed. They had mashed faces, broken ribs. We were handcuffed, really tightly, behind our backs,” said Mr Cobb-Smith.
They were taken to what they believe was the headquarters of the foreign intelligence service. “There was a big operation going on. Lots of people. I could hear screams coming from the second floor. I could see people being taking to other parts of the building hooded and handcuffed,” said Mr Koraltan.
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The BBC team was lined up facing a wall. A man moved down the line, sticking a sub-machine gun into their necks. “When he got to me at the end of the line, he pulled the trigger twice. The shots went past my ear,” said Mr Cobb Smith.“They all laughed as though it was very funny. There was a whole group of them in plain clothes.”
Then suddenly their ordeal was over. An offical who spoke fluent English offered them tea, coffee and cigarettes. “One man said to me, sorry it was a mistake by the military,” said Mr Killani. Seven hours later they were driven back to their hotel. The Libyan detainees were far less fortunate.