A Libyan secret agent on Thursday told a court trying two of his colleagues accused of the Lockerbie bombing how he was beaten unconscious by Senegalese security in Dakar after being accused of carrying explosives.
Mansour Al Sebar, who works at Tripoli airport for ESO, the Libyan security service, denied any link with the explosives seized at the time of his arrest.
Semtex explosive, detonators and an electronic timing device of the same type as that used in the Lockerbie bombing were allegedly found when Sebar and two other Libyans were arrested at Dakar airport in 1988.
Sebar was testifying before a Scottish court sitting in this Dutch locality under an international arrangement to try two Libyans charged with the bombing in which an airliner exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, killing 259 persons on board and 11 on the ground.
The defendants, Libyan intelligence agents Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, 48,and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, 44, were indicted in 1991 charged with blowing up Pan Am flight 103.
"There were soldiers at my right and at my left....beating me," Sebar said of his Dakar experience. "One had his foot on my handcuff and pressed it each time I spoke. I felt like their prey, like a prey amid lions. Each soldier was trying to show off to the other by beating me. It was a chaotic situation."
"You cannot imagine what happens in the third world when you are accused of anything," the witness told the court: "Nothing to do with this august court. You are completely lost. You don't even know what you are saying."
The court was questioning Sebar about trips, allegedly with false passports, he had apparently taken around Africa.
But the witness claimed that these journeys had all been so long ago that he could no longer remember why, where or when he had undertaken them.
At the time he was beaten at Dakar airport he had been in transit between Cotonou in the west African state of Benin and Algiers, he said. He had been held for four months in Dakar in connection with the explosives charges.
The trial is being held under Scottish law at this former US military base, declared by the Dutch government as Scottish territory for the duration, under a complex multi-nation arrangement that persuaded Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi to turn over the suspects -- CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
