Egyptian victims’ families refuse offer of compensation
CAIRO: Libya has agreed to an Egyptian request to postpone the execution of an Egyptian who was due to die yesterday the Mena press agency reported.
The agency quoted Assistant Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ouf saying that Libya had agreed to postpone the execution of Emad Abdel-Wahed Mohamed Ali, accused of killing a Libyan in 1999.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit contacted his Libyan counterpart Mohammed Abdel-Rahman Shalqam Saturday asking him to postpone the executions of ten Egyptians so as to allow more time to contact the families of the victims.
According to Libyan law, a death sentence can be rescinded if the victims’ families agree to pardon the killer or accept compensation, known as the Diya. However, most of the families in the ten cases involving Egyptians have so far refused to pardon the accused or accept compensation.
There is one exception where the family pardoned the killer, but the family is Egyptian, not Libyan. In the case of Ali, the family of the victim has also refused any sort of compensation.
Ouf had received Ali’s father and brother at the Ministry Saturday to inform them of the Minister’s success in ensuring a temporary stay of execution.
Ouf also verified that Ali’s death sentence followed correct legal procedure, and refused to question the integrity of Libya’s judicial system saying “what we don’t accept on ourselves we don’t accept for others.
The Assistant Foreign Minister also pointed out that the Egyptian embassies in Tripoli and Algiers have attempted to contact the victims’ families, in an attempt to persuade them to pardon the accused, but these efforts have been rebutted up till now, because in some cases the victims were mutilated.
The ten death cases involving Egyptians took place between 1994 and 2003, and Libya had informed Egypt that after a series of delays the executions would all be carried out within three months.
Ouf called for NGOs and the families of the accused to emulate the embassies’ efforts abroad in Egypt, to attempt to contact the victims’ families to convince them to agree to a pardon or accept a Diya.
