The remains of Abdul-Basset Zwawi’s body were found in a mass grave in the southern coastal town of Zliten, in Libya’s Misrata district. His body was with the bodies of his neighbours; the group was abducted the same day in March 2011 by fighters allied with former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
And his family found out it was Zwawi’s body because of DNA testing.
The DNA testers were also able to identify a further 17 missing persons’ bodies in the area.
The remains of Abdul-Basset Zwawi’s body were found in a mass grave in the southern coastal town of Zliten, in Libya’s Misrata district. His body was with the bodies of his neighbours; the group was abducted the same day in March 2011 by fighters allied with former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
And his family found out it was Zwawi’s body because of DNA testing.
The DNA testers were also able to identify a further 17 missing persons’ bodies in the area.
Abdul-Basset’s 19-year-old brother says the last time he saw him was early in the morning on March 16 – that was shortly before brigades loyal to Gaddafi attacked the city and began to kidnap dozens of young people. This included Abdul-Basset, who was four years older than his younger brother at the time.
Before this event, Abdul-Basset had been manning a checkpoint on the coastal road leading into the city. Abdul-Bazis can remember what his brother was wearing that day – he can also remember that the family thought he had gone to a neighbour’s house, where it was possible he was trapped because of fighting. However he never returned home.
Months passed. And Abdul-Basset’s family still hoped their son was alive. For one thing, they thought he might be in a Tripoli prison. However when, after the revolution ended Gaddafi’s regime, the prisons were emptied, Abdul-Basset still didn’t come home.
Then in early November of 2012, another resident of the city confessed that he had been forced to help bury ten young men in a mass grave; the young men had all been kidnapped from the city in mid-March and were killed and buried in a single grave on March 20.
Abdul-Basset’s family used to go to every mass grave they heard about in the hopes of finding out what had happened to their relative.
“We didn’t completely lose hope,” Abdul-Bazis says. “But then we heard about the grave. And there were bones in the grave with remnants of the same clothes I had seen Abdul-Basset wearing before he disappeared.” The corpse also had items in his pockets belonging to Abdul-Basset. “But we weren’t completely sure,” Abdul-Bazis notes.
“Misrata’s council informed us about the grave with the ten bodies,” explains Dr Osman Abdul-Jalil, who heads the DNA testing division run by the Ministry for the Affairs of the Families of the Martyrs and Missing Persons. “We took samples and identified eight bodies there.”
Both younger brother Abdul-Bazis and his mother had saliva taken so that DNA matching could be done and within days they had the results.
The bodies in the Zliten grave were already very decomposed so DNA samples had to be taken from their bones. Testing takes longer this way, Abdul-Jalil explains, but in this case it only took four days. “That’s considered record time,” Abdul-Jalil says.
“And my brother was really among those victims,” Abdul-Bazis says.
Despite success in this case, locals still seem to have issues with Libya’s relatively new Ministry for the Affairs of the Families of the Martyrs and Missing Persons, which is supposed to be in charge of activities like DNA testing and under whose auspices doctors like Abdul-Jalil work. Many say the work wouldn’t be being done at all without the cooperation of local councils and the families of the missing; they say the Ministry, or MFMM, is not doing its job properly.
Even Abdul-Jalil was complaining about the lack of help he received from the MFMM.
And the task remains a huge one: besides those who went missing during the recent revolution, there is also the matter of around 10,000 missing Libyans who disappeared while Gaddafi was in charge.
