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By Ashraf Abdul Wahab.
Tripoli, 6 September 2013:
The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said this evening that Libya was ready to release its . . .[restrict]two nationals who were among 24 Eastern Europeans engineers accused of servicing Qaddafi missiles.
The announcement comes at the end of a four-day mission to Tripoli by a Russian government team. This included a visit to the two men, Alexander Shadrof and Vladimir Dolgov in Zintan, where they are now held, after originally being detained near the Airport Road in Tripoli.
The Russian foreign ministry said that the conditions in which the men were being held were “much improved”. During the visit, each prisoner was able to use a phone to call his family.
Moscow reported that the Libyan government had said that the case of the two men would be settled “ in accordance with Libyan law and in the framework of the traditional friendship between the two countries”.
Shadrof and Dolgov, with three Belorussians and 19 Ukrainians were originally tried and convicted by a military court for working on Qaddafi’s rocketry during the revolution. All 24 were sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, save Shadrov who was given life imprisonment. Every one of them has always maintained that they were oil field engineers who had been forced to work on weaponry.
On 14 August however their convictions were overturned on the basis that they should have been tried in a civilian and not a military court. No date has yet been set for that civilian trial. However as soon as the sentences were quashed, the Russian foreign ministry announced that a delegation would be leaving for Libya. Together with the Belarusian and Ukrainian governments, the Russians had always argued that any trial should have been held in a civilian court.
It was not possible to contact the Russian embassy this evening.
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