By Ashraf Abdul-Wahab.
Tripoli, 13 October 2013:
The Prime Minister has accused the Libyan Revolutionaries Operations Room (LROR) and a handful of Congress . . .[restrict]members who tried to bring down his government by seizing him on Thursday of being terrorists.
Speaking in an interview with Al-Arabiya TV this evening, he said that the two groups had plotted to arrest him after attempts in Congress, first on last Tuesday and then the following day, to gather sufficient votes to remove him had failed.
He accused the LROR of lying and making contradictory statements when it first admitted being involved in the kidnapping on its Facebook page and then denying it.
The mobilization of the 100 armed vehicles that arrived at the Corinthia Hotel where he was staying could not have happened, he said, without orders being giving by someone in authority.
“We cannot ignore all the facts in our hands,” he said.
However, the put the number of people involved in this operation as “no more than four or five from the Congress and their names shall announced by Congress shortly,” he said.
It is widely believed that those he has in mind are members of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Justice and Construction Party which has been leading the movement in Congress to have him sacked.
He said that he had been with one of the plotters a few days prior to kidnapping. Proof of that was that his interrogator after he was seized spoke of the conversation he had had with the Congress member.
Meanwhile it was announced today by Khaled Shanta, a commander of the Counter Crime Agency (CCA) in Tripoli that, following investigations, legal proceedings had being dropped against the CCA’s official spokesman, Abdelhakim Belazi, in relation to statements he made to the media about the kidnapping. Belazi is also said to have been one of Zeidan’s interrogators while he was being held. Shanta reportedly claimed that the investigations had proved that the statements made by Belazi were true.
Belazi had said on Thursday, after Congress President Nuri Abu Sahmain’s condemnation of the seizure, that Abu Sahmain had been aware of the arrest order against Zeidan. [/restrict]