HANGINGS IN TRIPOLI FOCUS ATENTION ON LIBYAN DISSENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807600015-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 23, 2012
• Sequence Number: 15
• Publication Date: April 23, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/23: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807600015-8
WASHINGTON POST
23 April 1984
Hangings in Tripoli Focus
Attention, on Libyan Dissent
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
TRIPOLI, Libya, April 22-A
week ago today the Student Rev-
olutionary Committee, which en-
sures that Libyan leader Col.
Muammar Qaddafi's revolution-
ary principles are scrupulously
adhered to among Tripoli Uni-
versity's 27,000 students, an-
nounced that two students would
be publicly hanged for treason.
Some officials at the Foreign
Ministry here and elsewhere in-
terviewed this week voiced dis-
belief and shock that the stu-
dents would actually carry out
the severest of sentences on their
peers. Thousands of students-
3,000 to 18.000, depending on
whom you talk to-demonstrated
last Sunday in support of the
planned execution.
The next dcy, according to of-
ficials and witnesses, gallows
were constructed, one next to a
10-by-20-foot portrait of Qaddafi
at the entrance to the university,
and the two students in their
twenties were brought out before
thousands in the student body
and publicly hanged in a revo-
lutionary -spectacle. Some stu-
dents vomited and ran off
shrieking, according to witnesses
interviewed this week.
The hangings were reported to
the anti-Qaddafi movement in
Europe, and Libyan Foreign
Ministry officials reluctantly ac-
knowledge that the reports con-
tributed to the anti-Qaddafi de-
monstration the next day at the
Libyan embassy in London dur-
ing which a policewoman was
shot dead and 11 others injured.
The British say the shots were
fired from a window of the em-
bassy.
The hangings and the appar-
ent controversy they created on
and off campus caused the Lib-
yan Foreign Ministry to ask the
British, in stern requests made
in London and here, to prevent
the demonstration. Britain let
the demonstration take place,
however, and the shootings fol-
lowed.
"Who would have imagined
this?" said one Libyan Foreign
Ministry official today. The dis-
tress is over not just the shooting
and the diplomatic problems, but also over the
fact that the linkage between them and the public
hangings will inevitably turn attention to what is
happening in Libya.
From five days of interviews here it is apparent
that not everyone is happy with the state of the
15-year-old revolution in which absolute authority
theoretically resides with the people and an array
of people's committees, such as that of the stu-
dents. Under this theory, expounded by Qaddafi,
there is no government and all decisions, large and
small, are collective people's actions expressing
the will of the masses.
In one example of the continuing revolution,
Tripoli University was recently renamed the Uni-
I varsity of the Opening or University of September
1, a reference to Sept. 1, 1969, when Qaddafi
started his revolution and took power.
Of the demonstration at the university before
the executions, one official said, "From the size of
the demonstration you would thin