By Maha Ellawati.

Benghazi, 6 May:

An elderly Benghazi scrapyard dealer is alleged to have confessed to murdering his 20-year-old son during the revolution, so that he could claim NTC grants, claiming the boy was a victim of the conflict.

The suspect, whom the prosecutor refuses to name, was arrested along with two relatives, after investigations which involved the Abu-Salim Martyrs Battalion. The young man’s body was discovered on 30 April buried near the family’s former home in Benina, near the airport. The corpse was cut in half and both hands had been severed.

On the same day as the gruesome find, the father was arrested at his new home in the Benghazi suburb of Gwarsha. The prosecutor says he has since made a confession in which he implicates his other son along with the boy’s uncle and step-mother. The last two are now also under arrest.

Investigators believe that half of the body had originally been buried in the old house between a lavatory and a store cupboard, while the other half was concealed on a local garbage dump. However due to the smell of putrefaction, the father decided to dig up the part of the corpse in the house and rebury it in the same garbage dump near the airport.

Neighbours reported that the father had behaved strangely and appeared troubled. Investigators were granted a warrant to search the Benina House. They have suggested that the scrap dealer had been on bad terms with his first wife, the victim’s mother. Prosecutors are saying that whatever the original motive, the father had been seeking to claim compensation for his son, on the grounds that he had gone missing and been killed during the fighting.