The Australian
29th July, 2011
THE head of the Libyan rebel army has been killed by his own troops on suspicion of being on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s payroll.
The death of General Abdel Fatah Younis risked a dangerous split within the rebel leadership and raised the spectre of infighting. Loyalists of General Younis, who was Colonel Gaddafi’s interior minister before defecting to the rebels, threatened at one stage last night to storm the army base where they thought he was being held.
Hours later, the rebel leadership council in Benghazi announced that General Younis had been killed.
The head of the rebels’ National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, told reporters that rebel security had arrested the head of a group behind the killing.
He said General Younis had been summoned for questioning regarding “a military matter”, but that he and two aides were shot before they arrived for questioning.
Supporters of General Younis fired guns in the air as they staged a protest outside the leader’s house in an upmarket area of Benghazi. One of his entourage said that he suspected Mr Hiftar, who is the commander of ground forces, of engineering the coup.
General Younis was arrested during a tour of the front at Brega, the oil port that the rebel army has surrounded in the past weeks after a military offensive. His entourage said that he had been summoned by an envoy of the National Transitional Council – the rebel government Britain recognised this week – and was not seen again.
After news spread of his arrest, special forces units withdrew from the frontline in protest. “We’ll go and get him if they don’t release him,” said one of his bodyguards.
“If they oppose us and open fire, we’ll shoot back.”
He said that General Younis was being held by the February 17 Brigade, which is made up of the civilian volunteers and largely commanded by former army officers.
A security official of the February 17 Brigade confirmed that the unit was holding General Younis, whose decades of loyalty to Colonel Gaddafi had always led to questions about his allegiance to the rebels. “They are quite sure he was working for Gaddafi,” the official said.
But special forces supporters insisted that he turned a scrappy civilian militia, with no logistics or chain of command, into a real fighting force.
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