Libya sends envoy to Niger, seeking Gaddafi

BENGHAZI: Libya's new leaders sent envoys to Niger on Wednesday to try to prevent Muammar Gaddafi and his entourage evading justice by fleeing across a desert frontier toward friendly African states.

"We're asking every country not to accept him. We want these people for justice," Fathi Baja, the head of political affairs for the National Transitional Council, told Reuters in Benghazi, saying the ousted strongman may be close to the Niger or Algerian borders, waiting for an opportunity to slip across.

"He's looking for a chance to leave," Baja said.

Gaddafi's whereabouts remain a mystery. Another senior NTC official said he was tracked this week to an area in the empty Sahara of Libya's south. But in the north, at the besieged loyalist bastion of Bani Walid, yet more officials thought he might still be in the town with two of his sons.

The Pentagon said it knew nothing to indicate the fallen strongman had left Libya. Niger, which took in his security chief this week, insisted Gaddafi had not crossed its border.

Washington said it had also contacted the governments of Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Burkina Faso -- a swathe of poor former French colonies which benefited from Gaddafi's oil-fueled largesse in Africa. The State Department urged them to secure their borders, detain and disarm Gaddafi officials and confiscate any assets that might have been stolen from Libya.

Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam are wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said any country where he was found should hand him over to be tried, remarks that were echoed by US ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz.

With his overthrow, however, have come revelations of the extent to which US and British officials were until recently cooperating with Gaddafi -- once a pariah in the West but rehabilitated by Washington and London in the past decade.

Papers found by Reuters in Tripoli showed a British arm of US-based General Dynamics was modernising tanks and troop carriers for a feared brigade led by Gaddafi's son Khamis, as recently as January -- after "Arab Spring" protests toppled the president of next-door Tunisia. (Reuters)