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By Libya Herald reporters.
Benghazi, 8 January 2017:
An imprisoned terrorist suspect has said that the pair of Tunisian journalists who disappeared in Libya in 2014 were murdered in Derna.
The prisoner, Abderrazek Nassef Abderrazek Ali told his Libyan National Army captors that he had seen the two journalists, Sofiene Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari, taken to a wood outside Derna and executed.
Ali, a Libyan, told the Al-Hadath Al-Libya TV channel that Chourabi and Gtari had been seized at an IS roadblock between Ajdabiya and Labraq and taken to Derna. There an IS court had convicted them of espionage on the basis of evidence from Tunisian IS members.
The Tunisian government said this evening that it is checking the reports. The news, if true, is likely to provoke fresh anger in Tunisia, since in January 2015 their country’s top diplomat in Libya had insisted that the pair’s release was “inevitable” and said they were alive and would be free soon.
Ambassador Ridha Boukadi’s comments to the Turkish news agency Anadolu also included the assurance that the journalists’ release had been taken up by powerful figures in Libya.
It had long been feared that Chouraibi and Gtari were dead. However with the freeing of Indian, Filipino and Turkish nationals during the Bunyan Marous victory over terrorists in Sirte, the hope remained that they might still be kept as prisoners.
This story has been updated with the second photograph
