BENGHAZI, Libya — In a mourning tent for the Libyan rebels’ top military leader, who was assassinated last week in mysterious circumstances, relatives and members of his tribe warned on Tuesday of dire consequences, including violence, if rebel leaders did not move quickly to find his killers.
The relatives, including three of his sons, warned that the provisional rebel government, the Transitional National Council, was moving too slowly to form a committee to investigate the death the commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes. General Younes and two colleagues were shot to death by unknown gunmen on Thursday.
“A week passed with no information,” said one of the sons, who demanded that his first name not be published. “What we cannot take by law, we’ll take by arms.”
Other people at the gathering spoke in more measured terms but also warned of untold consequences if the Transitional National Council failed to identify the killers and explain their motives. Their admonitions deepened the sense of crisis around the rebel leaders, who are facing homegrown strife while struggling to root out what they say is a well-armed fifth column of supporters of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who lurk in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
In western Libya, seven rebel fighters were killed and dozens were injured near the city of Zlitan as rebels fought soldiers loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, Reuters reported. Late Monday night, one of the colonel’s sons, Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, said in his first television appearance in weeks that his father’s forces had no intention of giving up, regardless of whether NATO withdrew. “The fighting will continue until all of Libya is liberated,” he said.
In Benghazi on Tuesday, the second day of Ramadan, the city settled into different routines and coped with new challenges. Calls to bring armed men under central control were fueled by accusations that General Younes was killed by a person in one of the dozens of armed militias in the rebel areas.
A spokesman for the rebels, Shamsiddin Abdul Molah, said that the effort to organize the fighters was already under way. He said they had been given 10 days to abide by a decree and register with the rebel government’s Interior Ministry.
A committee was already formed, he added, to investigate the assassination of the general, who was once the interior minister in the Qaddafi government, though the spokesman referred questions about the committee to the public prosecutor.
Nearly every detail of the killings seems to be in dispute. The only point of agreement seems to be that the three men were killed on Thursday after General Younes left the front lines, near the city of Brega, to be questioned by a judicial committee.
The speakers in the mourning tent — relatives and members of various tribes, including the general’s own — suggested that the rebel authorities still had an opportunity to investigate the killings and to prevent an insurrection. The wide variety of groups in the tent seemed intended to convey unity.
Several people mentioned February 17, the date the rebels use to mark their uprising, to appeal to a larger cause. There were several attempts to calm heated rhetoric. When one young man stood up and asked members of General Younes’s tribe to gather after sunset with their weapons in a show of force, several tribal elders told him to quiet down.
One recurring demand seemed like a plea for transparency or a sign of lost confidence in the rebel leaders.
Many said that the investigators needed to look at all the rebel officials, including senior member of the government, and that any suspects should be prevented from travel abroad.
Fuente: nytimes.com