50,000 killed in Libya since start of uprising to oust Qaddafi: army officer

An estimated 50,000 people have been killed since the beginning of Libya’s uprising to oust Muammar Qaddafi six months ago, a military commander with the country’s interim ruling council said on Tuesday, amid reports that a French firm had helped Qaddafi’s regime spy on the emails and chat messages of opponents.

“About 50,000 people were killed since the start of the uprising,” Colonel Hisham Buhagiar, commander of the anti-Qaddafi troops who advanced out of the Western Mountains and took Tripoli a week ago, told Reuters.

“In Misrata and Zlitan between 15,000 and 17,000 were killed and Jebel Nafusa (the Western Mountains) took a lot of casualties. We liberated about 28,000 prisoners. We presume that all those missing are dead,” he said.

“Then there was Ajdabiyah, Brega. Many people were killed there too,” he said, referring to towns repeatedly fought over in eastern Libya.

The figures included those killed in the fighting between Qaddafi’s troops and his foes, and those who have gone missing over the past six months, he said.

Meanwhile, a report said Tuesday that a subsidiary of French IT firm Bull helped Qaddafi’s regime spy on the emails and chat messages of opponents of the fallen Libyan strongman.

Amesys, which on its website describes itself as “a key player in the field of security and critical systems at national and international levels,” installed a monitoring center in Tripoli in 2009, the Wall Street Journal said.

The paper, quoting people familiar with the matter, said the firm equipped the center with “deep packet inspection” technology to snoop on the online activities of Qaddafi’s enemies.

The Libyan regime earlier this year held talks with Amesys and other firms, including Boeing’s Narus unit, a maker of internet traffic-monitoring products, as they sought to boost the regime's surveillance apparatus, the Journal said.

Chinese telecom firm ZTE also provided technology for the monitoring operation, the report said.

Bull said it had no comment to make on the report when contacted by AFP.

Narus told the Wall Street journal: “There have been no sales or deployments of Narus technology in Libya,” while ZTE declined to comment when approached by the daily.

The Journal said that its journalists had toured the surveillance center and found files there that include emails written as recently as February, after the Libyan uprising kicked off.