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LAWYERS for the son of murdered Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi condemned his captors yesterday, after a video of his torture was released.
The video released by the Clearnews website, showed guards beating Saadi Gadaffi on the soles of his feet during an interrogation at al-Hadba prison.
Mr Gadaffi’s has been in pre-trial detention since authorities in Niger extradited him to Libya in 2014.
The former head of the Libyan Football Federation has been accused over the death of a player, as well as by association with his father.
International Criminal Court (ICC) defence lawyer Melinda Taylor, who represents Mr Gadaffi in the Hague, cautiously confirmed the video’s veracity.
“It does appear to be Saadi Gadaffi,” she told Russia Today. “He looks the same in the sense [that] his head [had been] shaved which happened to him last year.”
The video shows an interrogator forcing the blindfolded man to listen to the screams of other prisoners being tortured in the next room, before being made to watch them being beaten.
Ms Taylor said the video was evidence of an “international crime, crime of torture and cruel and inhumane treatment.
“It appears to be criminal treatment in the sense of it being severe physical treatment and also psychological in the sense that he is being forced to listen to other people apparently being tortured,” she said.
Towards the end of the video an interrogator asks Mr Gadaffi whether he wants to be beaten on the feet or the buttocks. he replies: “What kind of a question is this? My feet.”
The bound prisoner is then beaten on the feet as he screams in pain. He begs them to stop, saying: “Don’t. I will tell you all the information you want.”
Libya, once the most prosperous nation in Africa, has been locked in a chaotic civil war between rival governments in its east and west and several smaller factions since the Nato-backed coup in 2011.
Al-Hadba is under the control of forces allied with the Islamist-supported Tripoli government, which opposes the Tobruk-based Western-backed government.
