LIBYA NEWS

Libya: Free elections in eight months, says rebel leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil

Libya will hold free elections in eight months' time and Col Muammar Gaddafi will be put on trial in the country and not handed over to an international court, rebel leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil has said.

Mustafa Abdel Jalil said he will end Libya's international isolation Photo: AP

 

12:00PM BST 24 Aug 2011

"In eight months we will hold legislative and presidential elections," said Mr Jalil, chairman of the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) which now controls all but isolated pockets of Libya. 

"We want a democratic government and a just constitution. Above all we do not wish to continue to be isolated in the world as we have been up to now," he told Italy's La Repubblica newspaper.

On Mr Jalil's timescale elections would be held in April of next year, about six months after neighbouring Egypt is expected to vote in its first presidential election since the revolution earlier this year. 

Gaddafi's whereabouts remained unknown Wednesday after the rebels had overrun his Tripoli compound, but the rebel leader said he and his inner circle should be captured alive and stand trial in Libya. 

"The Gaddafi era is over, even if it will only really end with his capture and his conviction for the crimes he has committed."

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The consensus within the NTC was that Gaddafi and his cohorts is that he should be judged "in a fair trial, but it must take place in Libya," Jalil told the newspaper. 

For that to happen "we need to take them alive and treat them differently from the way the colonel treated his adversaries. He will stay in the memory only for the crimes, the arrests and the political assassinations he carried out," he added. 

The announcement may lead to tension with the International Criminal Court which has consistently staked its claim to try the dictator for crimes against humanity. 

After a six-month uprising against the strongman, who ruled over Libya for 42 years, there were only "pockets of resistance" left in Tripoli, and his troops has retreated to Gaddafi's stronghold port city of Sirte, Jalil said. 

He said the "new" Libya "must be a different country from the past, based on the principles of freedom, equality and fraternity," and will have "strong relations with other countries, based on mutual respect and cooperation." 

"We will be an active member of the international community and we will respect the treaties signed in the past," he said.