An elite US interrogation team was questioning the senior al-Qaeda figure who was captured in Libya and then taken on to a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea, US officials said yesterday.
Nazih al-Ragye, better known by the cover name Abu Anas al-Liby, is being held aboard the USS San Antonio, an amphibious transport dock ship, the officials said.
He is being questioned by the US High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, an inter-agency group created in 2009 and housed in the FBI’s National Security Branch.
Liby is a suspect in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 civilians.
Wanted by the FBI, which gives his age as 49 and had offered a $5 million reward for help in capturing him, Liby was indicted in 2000 along with 20 other al-Qaeda suspects including Osama bin Laden and current global leader Ayman al-Zawahri. Liby’s indictment was filed in New York, making that a possible venue for a civilian, rather than military, trial.
One US official said he might face prosecution in New York, although there has been no formal announcement about US government plans.
Liby’s son, Abdullah al Ragye, 19, told reporters that men pulled up in four cars on Saturday, drugged his father, dragged him from his vehicle and drove off with him.
What Liby’s alleged role was is still not clear. His son denied his father had taken part in the bombings of the US embassies.
Liby was described in a 2012 US Congressional report as “a builder of al-Qaeda’s network in Libya”, according to the Long War Journal, which documents what is known in the US as the War on Terror.
Libya’s porous security would have given an al-Qaeda suspect broad communication with other Islamists and al-Qaeda affiliates, journal Senior Editor Thomas Joscelyn said.
“It is not just one or two,” he said. “there are whole a host of known al-Qaeda person-alities he could have been working with and known al-Qaeda linked groups he could be working with.”
Libya’s government, wary of an Islamist backlash, described the capture of a Libyan citizen on its soil as a “kidnapping” and asked Washington for an explanation. Some Libyans are already bracing for an Islamist reaction.
The capture came the same weekend that a Navy SEAL team swooped into Somalia in an operation targeting a senior al Shabaab figure known as Ikrima, whom US officials described as a foreign fighter commander for the organisation in Somalia.
US officials say they failed to capture him or kill him, breaking off the raid in order to avoid civilian casualties.
US officials say that their forces inflicted some al Shabaab casualties.
No US personnel were killed or injured.