Gadhafi son and ICC in ‘indirect’ talks about possible surrender

The International Criminal Court is in indirect negotiations with a son of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi about his possible surrender for trial, the chief prosecutor said Friday.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo told The Associated Press talks were discount jerseys being held through intermediaries, whom he did not identify, to assure Seif al-Islam Gadhafi that he would receive a fair trial and that he could be helped to find a new country of residence if he were acquitted.

He said he did not know exactly where Mr. Gadhafi is.

The 39-year-old was reported to be heading through the desert to Mali, where the former Libyan intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senoussi fled Wednesday.

An adviser to the president of Niger said Mr. Gadhafi nfl jerseys cheap should cross the border into Mali later Friday or Saturday.

Mr. Gadhafi and Mr. al-Senoussi were indicted in June for unleashing a campaign of murder and torture to suppress the uprising against the Gadhafi regime that broke out in February.

Conveying a sense of urgency, Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said he believed Mr. Gadhafi also was in touch with unidentified mercenaries offering to find him refuge in an African country that does not cooperate with the court.

He mentioned Zimbabwe as a likely possibility, and said the court jerseys wholesale was in contact with other countries to prevent Mr. Gadhafi's escape by denying any plane carrying him permission to fly through its air space.

“We are having informal conversations with Seif Gadhafi in order to see if he can be surrendered to the court,” Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said in a telephone call from The Hague.

“We know he has a different option because apparently there is a group of mercenaries willing to move him to a country, probably Zimbabwe,” the prosecutor said. Some of the mercenaries may be from South Africa, he said.

Mr. Gadhafi was pressing for clarifications about his fate should he be acquitted, and Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said he has made it clear to the fugitive that he could ask the judges to send him to a country other than Libya.

“He says he is innocent and he will prove his natyinnocence,” the prosecutor said.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo also said the court was waiting for documentary evidence confirming the death of Moammar Gadhafi to formally close the case against him.

Seif al-Islam, whom the court described as the de facto prime minister during the early months of the uprising, was the heir apparent in the regime that ruled Libya for 42 years.

Word of his movement toward Mali came Thursday from an adviser to Niger's president, who could not be named because of the sensitivity of the case. The adviser, an influential elder in the ethnic Tuareg community which is spread across several Saharan countries steelers jerseys cheap and which overwhelmingly supported Gadhafi, said Seif was somewhere between Algeria and Niger.

He was unlikely to stop in Niger because the government of President Mahamadou Issoufou has said it would arrest him and hand him over to the court in The Hague.

The UN Security Council authorized the court, the world's cheap nfl jerseys first permanent war crimes tribunal, to investigate events in Libya last February. The council's action was necessary because Libya did not recognize the court's jurisdiction and has not ratified its founding treaty.

But after the victory of rebel forces, it was unclear whether the Transitional National Council now governing Libya would seek to have Mr. Gadhafi handed over for trial in his own country or let the international court proceed with its case.