By Sami Zaptia.
Tripoli, 5 November 2013:
Speaking live on last night’s nine o’clock news on Libya Al-Ahrar TV, GNC member Abdallah Gamaty, . . .[restrict]a member of the unofficial and loose grouping of 94 General National Congress members, said that the assigning of the Libya Revolutionary Operations Room (LROR) to protect Tripoli by Congress President Nuri Abu Sahmain was illegal.
Gamaty said that according to the Transitional Constitutional Declaration, the formation of any armed groups had to be under the command of the GNC as a whole.
Abu Sahmain had obtained the power, based on a perceived urgent security threat, from Congress in a late sitting on the eve of Eid to command the LROR and empower it to protect Tripoli.
However, being the eve of Eid celebrations, on the last day of the fasting month of Ramadan, there were not enough GNC members to obtain a two-thirds majority for the vote. Many GNC members, including the group of 94 who had walked out of the GNC last week over, feel that the vote was illegal.
It will be recalled that the LROR was implicated in the recent kidnapping of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, an event that the group of 94 GNC members are intent on investigating with a special GNC investigative committee.
Gamaty denied that the GNC had ended its session in discord today and was unable to vote on the dissolution of the LROR. He said that because there were other matters being debated today, they had simply run out of time and that the debate on this would continue on Sunday.
Furthermore, Gamaty also confirmed that there was an advanced debate within the GNC on what they are calling the “Roadmap”, which was an attempt to come up with plans and options to the extension of the lifetime of the GNC beyond 7 February, 2014.
Gamaty said that one option is to prepare for elections prior to 7 February. Another was to speed up the work of the GNC and to reach consensus so that any extension would be a relatively short one. This included the option to adopt the 1952 constitution, he added.
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