Detainees tortured and denied medical care.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) suspends work in detention centres in Misrata.
With the conflict in Libya ending, many detainees were in need of surgical care, physiotherapy and psychological support. Médecins Sans Frontières doctors and psychologists, who had been working in this detention centre daily since the beginning of August 2011, has grown increasingly concerned.
Christopher Stokes, directeur général de MSF-Belgique (in English)
It was very possible to distinguish the kind of wounds that we were seeing after the interrogation from the kinds of wounds that we would see as a result of the conflict. So we had patients presenting themselves with bruises across their body, we also had patients with tissue necrosis due to electric shocks and also cigarette burns. So for the MSF teams on the ground, the medical teams, it was very easy to distinguish between those 2 types of patients, there was no confusion possible.
In total, MSF treated 115 people who had torture-related wounds. The situation was unacceptable for MSF, who saw its work being instrumentalised, used to put detainees back on their feet between two interrogations. In January, MSF informed Misrata's authorities of the situation and decided to suspend its medical activities in the town's detention centres.
