A suspected al Qaeda figure alleged to have helped plan the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya has died in New York just days ahead of his scheduled trial, his son and the prosecutor said on Saturday.
Abu Anas al-Liby (also spelled al-Libi),
whose real name was Nazih al-Ragye, was seized by U.S. forces in October 2013 in the Libyan capital Tripoli and brought to the United States to face criminal charges stemming from the bombings, which killed 224 people.
Liby, 50, died on Friday at a local hospital after being transported from a Manhattan correctional center on Wednesday, according to a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Speaking to Reuters by telephone, his son Ahmed al-Ragye blamed U.S. authorities for his death.
“We hold the U.S. legally responsible for the death of my father. He had developed cancer while being in prison in America,” Ragye said.
“We had undergone surgery in a hospital and had been sent back afterwards to prison though his condition had not been stable,” he said.
Al-Libi’s wife said her husband underwent liver surgery three weeks ago, went into a coma and was moved prematurely back to prison where he suffered complications.
His wife said that she spoke to al-Libi last time from prison on Thursday.
“His voice was weak and he was in a bad condition,” she said. “It seems they didn’t keep him for enough time in hospital.”
On Friday, she said a lawyer told her that al-Libi returned to hospital where he was placed on a ventilator, and “he was dying then.”
“We demand U.S. authorities to send his body back without conducting an autopsy so we can see ourselves and verify why he died.”
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in the letter Liby suffered “sudden complications arising out of his long-standing medical problems” and died on Jan. 2. Prosecutors said Liby’s lawyer was with him throughout the day and an imam was present at the hospital. Liby’s attorney, Bernard Kleinman, could not be immediately reached.
Liby had been scheduled to face trial, along with accused Osama bin Laden associate Khalid al-Fawwaz, on Jan. 12. Both men had pleaded not guilty.
Liby was seized by commandos from the Pentagon’s elite Delta Force outside his residence in Tripoli and transferred by Zodiac raft to the USS San Antonio, a U.S. Navy ship floating off the Libya coast, Kleinman recently told Reuters.
In later court filings, al-Libi said he was taken to the USS San Antonio in the Mediterranean Sea, where he was subjected to daily interrogation by CIA agents who warned him that the questioning would be the “easiest step” of three.
“I took this to mean that the physical and psychological torture would only increase if I failed to cooperate with my questioners,” he said. “These threats continued the entire time I was on board the ship.”
Eventually he was flown to the USA.
Al-Libi’s lawyer, Bernard Kleinman, has stressed the 157-page federal indictment only accused al-Libi of participating in visual and photographic surveillance of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in late 1993 and researching potential sites for other attacks with members of al-Qaeda in 1994. Those other sites included the local office of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as “British, French and Israeli targets,” according to the indictment.
“This case involves issues much more tinged with emotion and trauma than other cases,” Kleinman said in 2013. “The fact that Mr. al-Libi will be tried in New York, barely a half mile from the World Trade Center site, and that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda will be referenced numerous times in connection with his co-defendants cannot be ignored.”
The Libyan government criticized the operation as an unauthorized incursion. Documents filed with the court in September later revealed the Libyan government was paying his legal fees.