Libya jails 4 Palestinians over alleged Hamas links

Members of Hamas in Gaza on 6 July 2017 [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency]

A court in Tripoli on Wednesday sentenced four Palestinians to prison terms ranging from 17 to 22 years over their alleged links to Hamas.

The four defendants were accused of “setting up a secret foreign organisation on Libyan territory, arms possession and conspiring against state security.”

The Palestinians were arrested on 6 October 2016 from their homes in the capital, Tripoli, and were taken to an unknown destination.

Who is to blame for Gaza? – Cartoon [Carlos Latuff/MiddleEastMonitor]

Family sources told Arabi21 news site that they had been denied family visits for two months before their prison sentences were announced.

According to the sources, the detainees suffered daily abuses resulted in one of them losing one of his eyes. One detainee named Marwan who suffers from hypertension and diabetes has been denied his medication.

OPINION: The Arabs are paying the price for peace with Israel

The four Palestinians used to work for a technology company in the capital, Tripoli.

The detainees’ families expressed their “fear that they would be handed over to Israel via a third party” appealing to all concerned bodies to help release them.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.