BENGHAZI, Libya: Moammar Gadhafi’s forces have committed “crimes against humanity and war crimes on a large scale,” according to a human rights lawyer gathering evidence in Libya to present to the International Criminal Court.

Torture, mass executions, using humans as shields and banned cluster bombs all testify to the violence inflicted by Gadhafi’s regime on the Libyan population in recent weeks, French lawyer Philippe Moriceau told AFP.
Government forces charged eastward in the middle of March, pushing back rebels seeking to topple Gadhafi into their stronghold Benghazi, and then began bombarding its western gate. They were beaten back when NATO launched airstrikes from March 19.

According to Moriceau, vice president of the France-based Lawyers Without Borders (LWOB) group, in the short time Gadhafi’s forces attacked Benghazi, “the motto was to ‘rape, rob and kill.’”

“There was systematic murder of men, women and children and rape by soldiers,” the lawyer said in an interview in Benghazi.
Moriceau said there had been “massacres and houses with dozens of bodies of civilians” found in areas on the outskirts of the city.

“We have videos,” he said.
He and an Italian colleague are in Libya, he said, carrying out a Lawyers Without Borders mission to “identify victims” and prepare a file for submission to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

“I do not know” whether the court will then launch proceedings against the Libyan leader,” Moriceau said, adding however he believed Gadhafi ought to be brought to international justice.
Moriceau said a succession of LWOB teams would be working on the case as the probe “will be long and far reaching” and take “several years.”

He added that Gadhafi was “smarter than many others” and if pushed to that point would try to negotiate a departure that would ensure he did not face a trial.
Moriceau said the evidence gathered so far is “extremely accurate” and shows “systematic and widespread attacks against civilian populations on a large scale.”

“We are talking of thousands of victims” dead or wounded only in the Benghazi region alone, he said, adding that hundreds of others were missing.
Aside from the current conflict, Moriceau has dealt with previous victims of Gadhafi.
He said there are many cases of “arbitrary imprisonments for decades without ever seeing a judge, with people dying in jail without anyone knowing.”

Moriceau cites an example of a woman who “always brings food to the prison of Benghazi … even though there is no hope that her husband, jailed in the 80s, is still alive. It is terrible.”
In Libya, families are obliged to feed their jailed relatives.
Most Libyans are suffering “massive trauma,” Moriceau said.