THE GUN.

Last week we reported about the five dead men in the uniforms of Qaddafi soldiers found rotting in a cement basin near Qawalish. (The first link leads to a previous post on this tumblr; this link leads to coverage in the NYT.) Since those reports, questions surrounding what happened to these men have found traction among other news agencies, and reports from other journalists are forthcoming. And since then the site has been bulldozed.

Here was the site last week. Inside this concrete basin were at least five rotting corpses. A sixth was under a mound of earth and rocks in the olive grove at left.

This was the site on Monday.

The corpses, apparently, have been covered with this mound of soil, below, which is a few meters away from where the remains were first found.

Rebels now say the dead men were given proper Muslim burials. We’ll leave to you to decide if the grounds in these images looks like a proper, religious or respectful burial.

What happened to these men remains an open question. But official rebel sources have made their position clear, insisting that these are the remains of Qaddafi soldiers killed and hidden by other Qaddafi soldiers. The evidence for that claim is, principally, that the rebels say so. The possibility that some of rebels might have done this to their enemies has been rejected outright.

Whoever killed the men and first hid their bodies took the trouble of dropping them inside the concrete basin at the top of this post, which is just along the main road to Qawalish. It was not a well-chosen place. The blood stains on the concrete, and tire treads on the soft soil, and the discarded leg-or-wrist bindings beside the place, suggested criminal battlefield conduct that had required the work of at least several men. Here is one of the bindings.

And here is a photograph found at the site when we first visited. It’s nowhere to be seen now. Was this one of the men inside that basin?

The mass grave was within sight of the road from Zintan to Qawalish. Over the weekend, upon noticing as we drove past the basin that the site had been dismantled and bulldozed, we tried to stop to learn more. Our driver refused, announcing that he was under orders from the rebel military leadership not to allow us near the site. It seemed, he said, that doctors were worried that journalists might be exposed to unhealthy conditions near the rotting remains. This did not quite pass the sniff test, so we pressed. Then came a different answer — the rebel military council had simply told him, without notifying us, that he was not to take us there, and that was that. That was Saturday.

We could not find a new driver overnight. And when we insisted again on stopping on Sunday, we managed at least to get the car to stop. This time the driver told us that if we walked toward the mass grave to take photographs, he would abandon us along the road, on the arid plateau, near the front lines. Then he berated a pair of drivers working for an internationally well-known television crew, which was following us on the road, for stopping, too. Again the driver told us he had been ordered by the rebel military council to keep us from reaching the site.

On Monday, with our old driver no longer in our employ, we managed to get the spot nonetheless. We found that heavy equipment had been busy.  

Are the rebels seriously investigating what happened to these men, or have they merely tried to block access and hope the questions go away?  The photo record of the bodies, made before they were removed and covered with tons of dirt, is too gruesome to publish here. Suffice to say one corpse had his pants bunched down around his ankles, and another appeared to have been beheaded. At least one of the victims appeared to have been black. In other words, their condition and whereabouts raised many questions. These questions are not likely to go away.

It’s not an ordinary thing for five uniformed men to end up like this. And any reasonable forensic and investigative standard would say that is too soon to blame, or, for that matter, to exonerate.  

The latter – instant exoneration of the rebels, along with official incuriosity and hostility to further questions — is where things seem to stand.

Note to self: In a war in which the rebels have insisted they fight for freedom, democracy and rule of law, but has also carried signs of racism, tribalism and factionalim, the way the de facto rebel authority has handled these corpses — and questions about them — are further grounds for pause. Were these bodies the result of Qaddafi-on-Qaddafi intra-military violence? Or are they hints of a war that was not supposed to be?