International Criminal Court opens inquiry into Italy over release of Libyan warlord

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Judges at the International Criminal Court have officially asked Italy on Monday to explain why the country released a Libyan man suspected of torture, murder and rape rather than sending him to The Hague.

Italian police arrested Ossama Anjiem, also known as Ossama al-Masri, last month but rather than extraditing him to the Netherlands, where the ICC is based, sent him back to Libya aboard an Italian military aircraft.

“The matter of state’s non-compliance with a request of cooperation for arrest and surrender by the court is before the competent chamber,” the court’s spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah said in a statement.

Addressing parliament last week, Italian Justice Minister Carlo Nordio defended the decision to send al-Masri home, claiming the ICC had issued a contradictory and flawed arrest warrant. The court, he said, "realized that an immense mess was made,” he told lawmakers.

Al-Masri was arrested in Turin on the ICC warrant on Jan. 19, the day after he arrived in the country from Germany to watch a soccer match. The Italian government has said Rome’s court of appeals ordered him released on Jan. 21 because of a technical problem in the way that the ICC warrant was transmitted, having initially bypassed the Italian justice ministry.

The ICC said it does not comment on national judicial proceedings.

Al-Masri’s arrest had posed a dilemma for Italy because it has close ties to the internationally recognized government in Tripoli as well as energy interests in the country.

According to the arrest warrant, al-Masri heads the Tripoli branch of the Reform and Rehabilitation Institution, a notorious network of detention centers run by the government-backed Special Defense Force, which acts as a military police unit combating high-profile crimes including kidnappings, murders as well as illegal migration.

Like many other militias in western Libya, the SDF has been implicated in atrocities in the civil war that followed the overthrow and killing of longtime Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

Additionally, any trial in The Hague of al-Masri could bring unwanted attention to Italy’s migration policies and its support of the Libyan coast guard, which it has financed to prevent migrants from leaving.

In October, the court unsealed arrest warrants for six men allegedly linked to a brutal Libyan militia blamed for multiple killings and other crimes in a strategically important western town where mass graves were discovered in 2020.