Loyalist bodies found

CAIRO – Fifty-three bodies discovered over the weekend were those of loyalists of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi who appeared to have been executed after capture, the latest in a string of extrajudicial attacks attributed to revolutionary fighters from the western city of Misrata, a human rights group said Monday.

Gadhafi’s war machine laid waste to Misrata during the months-long, NATO-backed rebellion that eventually ended his regime’s four decades in power. But since Gadhafi was chased from Tripoli, men from Misrata have launched a bloody campaign of vengeance in which, witnesses and human rights groups charge, they have raped African workers, razed a village, executed prisoners, looted private property and now refuse to disarm or to leave the posts they have commandeered in Tripoli, the country’s capital. The Misrata brigades were holding Gadhafi when he died in disputed circumstances last week.

Human Rights Watch, the international advocacy group that announced the discovery of the 53 bodies, said in a news release that Misrata forces were in control of the Hotel Mahari in Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, where the “badly decomposed” corpses were found.

The release cited witness accounts and graffiti that indicated that five of Misrata’s best-known brigades were in Sirte last week when the killings are thought to have occurred. The bodies were “clustered together, apparently where they had been killed, on the grass in the sea-view garden of the hotel,” according to the Human Rights Watch release.

“This latest massacre seems part of a trend of killings, looting and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gadhafi fighters who consider themselves above the law,” said Peter Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher who investigated the killings. “It is imperative that the transitional authorities take action to rein in these groups.”