A Libyan militantwhose fabricated testimony about Al-Qaeda was used by the United States to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq has killed himself in his Libyan jail cell, Libyan newspaper Oed reported Monday. Human rights groups in the West demanded an immediate investigation into the death of Ali Mohamed Abdelaziz Al-Fakhiri, 46, also known as Ibn Sheikh Al-Libi and a key figure in US intelligence reports on Al-Qaeda before the war. Oed newspaper said Libyan authorities were investigating the case. Captured by US-led forces in Pakistan in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Fakhiri later made up a story about links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq to avoid torture while in the custody of a third country, according to a 2006 US Senate Intelligence Committee report. Fakhiri was later returned to US custody and withdrew his accusations about ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda in Jan. 2004, the US committee report said. The committee found that in the run-up to the Iraq war the US intelligence community based assessments about possible Iraqi training of Al-Qaeda largely on evidence from Fakhiri. Oed reported that Fakhiri was extradited by the US to Libya in 2006, when Tripoli authorities sentenced him to life imprisonment. It was not immediately clear if he was held at the Guantanamo prison camp. The paper said Fakhiri was recruited in 1990 to join Islamist militants in Afghanistan. He later became the head of a military camp in Afghanistan training militants from Arab countries. He was caught by US-led forces as he was crossing the Afghan border into Pakistan. Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Heba Morayef told Reuters in London that she saw Fakhiri on April 27 during a visit toTripoli's main Abu Salim jail. She said Fakhiri appeared for just two minutes in a prison courtyard, look well, but was unwilling to speak to the HRW team “Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?” she quoted him as saying. She said HRW wants a transparent investigation into his death.” In London, Reprieve, an organization of human rights lawyers said it was alarmed by the reported death of “the ‘informer' whose statements – obtained by torture – were used to justify the Iraq war.” Oed said former friends of Fakhiri cast doubt on his reported suicide, arguing that the former mosque preacher from the coastal Ajdabiya town knew suicide was prohibited by Islam.
