Nation & World

CAIRO, Egypt — Torture and death in detention have become widespread problems in postwar Libya, international humanitarian groups said Thursday.

Amnesty International said "several" people had been tortured to death in detention "by officially recognized military and security entities as well as by a multitude of armed militias."

Amnesty said its researchers in Libya met detainees in prisons in and around the cities of Tripoli, Misrata and Gheryan who bore wounds consistent with torture, including open wounds on their heads, limbs and back. Many claimed to have been suspended in stress positions and beaten, and given electric shocks.

Most victims were Libyans believed to have remained loyal to the government of Moammar Gadhafi during the nine-month conflict that led to his ouster, but some were sub-Saharan Africans. Africans from outside of Libya were often accused of being Gadhafi mercenaries during the revolution.

Doctors Without Borders, a group that specializes in providing emergency medical care in conflict zones, on Thursday suspended operations in detention centers in Misrata, because it said torture was so rampant that some detainees were brought for care only to make them fit for further interrogation.

"Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for further interrogation," said Christopher Stokes, the group's general director. "This is unacceptable."

Human Rights Watch said it had documented torture in Libyan detention centers in the past six months, said Sidney Kwiram, an investigator for the group, which has monitored prison conditions in Libya since February and in Misrata since April.

"Torture is ongoing and is used to force confessions or for punishment," said Kwiram, via telephone from Misrata. She said the persistence of torture was not so much a reflection of policy by the transitional national authorities as of the weakness of Libya's institutions after nine months of war and four decades of Gadhafi rule.

"In some cases, commanders here form their own fiefdoms, so it is not a matter of what the government is saying," she said. "What matters is who is in charge of a facility."

Refugees from the Libyan city of Tawergha told similar tales of torture and killing last month in an informal camp in Tripoli, the capital.

Tawergha was largely destroyed in September in revenge attacks by rebel fighters from neighboring Misrata, who accused its residents of participating in a bloody four-month siege of their town by Gadhafi forces that killed more than 1,000 people.

Almost all of Tawergha's 30,000 resident fled, but fighters from Misrata have continued to attack, detain, torture and in some cases kill people from the town, even after they fled to other parts of the country, said refugees and activists.

Libya's transitional government has struggled for months to exert authority, even in the streets of the capital, which is largely controlled by a patchwork of regional militias whose members defer to their own commanders, not government security forces.

The central government set two deadlines, one in November and one in December, for out-of-town militias to leave the capital, both of which were ignored.