In a statement to Sada Newspaper, an official source revealed that the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Economy and Industry, Fathi Ounis, submitted his resignation yesterday.
The source noted that it was not the first time that Fathi Ounis submitted his resignation to the Minister of Economy and requested to relieve him of his duty.
In a statement to WTV, the economist Omar Al-Zarmouh said that the Central Bank of Libya is supposed to publish data on its foreign exchange reserves as a part of its commitment to transparency, pointing out that Banking Act stipulates that data should be disseminated in the Official Journal.
Al-Zarmouh added that those who follow up the CBL’s statements will note that the reserves were published to the limit of 2015, which means that the bank intended an information blackout in order to avoid many problems.
The National Oil Corporation claimed that total oil production inside Libya is down to 95,077 barrels a day, as of Tuesday 28, 2020.
The forced restriction of oil and gas production has caused financial losses exceeding $4,348,518,033 since January 17, 2020.
As a consequence, the public treasury has incurred additional costs to cover domestic shortages of fuels by importing from external sources, which has increased the financial burden on the fuel budget.
NOC noted that it is concerned about the present and future of the country, and stressed the need to lift the blockade on its facilities and resume oil and gas production, in order to boost the national economy.
National Oil Corporation (NOC) confirmed the reopening of a pipeline providing gas to power stations and factories in Western Libya.
According to the NOC, the reopening of the gas pipeline would provide approximately 200 million cubic feet of gas daily to cement factories and to el-Khoms and Misurata power stations.
It will be reminded that the pipeline was illegally closed on April 9, 2020 forcing NOC and its subsidiary Brega Petroleum Marketing Company to purchase and send imported diesel to the power stations. In this way NOC kept the power stations generating electricity and avoided more power cuts for citizens.
New medical supplies have reached three municipalities in Zawiya to help doctors and nurses who are tackling the coronavirus.
According to a statement issued today, the Sustainable Development Department of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) delivered on Tuesday April 28, 2020, numerous medical items to Zawiya’s three municipalities; Zawiya Centre Municipality, Zawiya South Municipality and Zawiya East Municipality, to contribute to the prevention of the emerging coronavirus.
These medical supplies included protective masks and gloves, thermometers, disinfectant spraying equipment, hand sanitizers, and other medical materials.
“After raising people’s awareness about the danger of spreading the virus, we needed to provide preventive equipment that will contribute to curbing the spread of disease,” said Mr Mukhtar Abdedayem, head of NOC Sustainable Development Department.
Repsol Company has supplied these materials, as part of NOC’s collaboration with international partners to help communities adjacent to oil operations.
Dollar exchange rate continued to rise in the Libyan black market, reaching 6.40 LYD, while the euro rose to record 6.91 LYD.
Traders attributed the reason for the rise to decrease in the supply of dollar and non-sale of the currency from the Central Bank of Libya , amid fears of a repetition of what happened in 2016 and 2017, where dollar rose to more than 9 LYD.
It is reported that the dollar exchange rate was 6.15 dinars yesterday, while the euro 6.64.
An apparently unlawful drone attack by the United Arab Emirates that hit the Al-Sunbulah biscuit factory in Wadi al-Rabie, Libya, south of Tripoli, on November 18, 2019, killed 8 civilians and wounded 27, Human Rights Watch said today, after investigating the incident. The UAE appeared to take little or no action to minimize harm to civilians in its attack and should conduct a transparent investigation of this incident, make the results public, and compensate victims or their families.
Since the current armed conflict in Tripoli erupted in April 2019, the UAE has been conducting air and drone strikes to support the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), previously known as the Libyan National Army, one of two major Libyan parties to the conflict, some of which have resulted in civilian casualties. All casualties in the November incident were civilian factory workers, including 7 Libyans and 28 foreign nationals, all of them men.
“The UAE attacked a factory that makes food products, with no indication there were any military targets,” said Eric Goldstein, acting Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The failure to verify that the workers there were civilians and that there was no legitimate military target would show recklessness and bad intelligence.”
A Human Rights Watch researcher visited the scene of the attack in December 2019 and documented material damage to the factory from drone-launched guided missiles and found remnants of the weapons. Human Rights Watch did not observe any military targets in the area. The strikes damaged the building and destroyed a truck and a car. The factory stopped operating after the attack.
At the strike site, Human Rights Watch found remnants of at least four Blue Arrow-7 (BA-7) laser-guided missiles that were launched by a Wing Loong-II drone. In Libya only the UAE uses this type of drone and missile.
Human Rights Watch interviewed five people who had been at the site, who said there were five missiles, all launched within a few minutes. The researcher met with two employees of Al-Sunbulah company who were present on the day of the strike and with three other employees who had been injured during the attack and were recovering at a nearby facility belonging to the company.
The attack site is a factory compound with several industrial hangars mostly used as warehouses to store raw materials and equipment. The company produces over 20 types of food items. The surrounding area was mostly farmland, although Human Rights Watch saw some individual houses and other factories – including a paper napkin factory and a wheat mill – that were not near each other.
Satellite imagery taken since early April 2019 shows construction of a possible checkpoint on the main road running alongside the factory compound, about 75 meters east of the Omar Ibn al-Khatab mosque. Imagery since February 2020 shows barriers on the road in the vicinity of the possible checkpoint. When Human Rights Watch visited the site in December 2019 researchers saw no sign that armed groups had been at the facility. The employees interviewed said the closest military presence at the time of the attack was a field hospital at a different mosque at least 1.5 kilometers away. At the time of the visit, the researcher heard artillery shelling in the distance and employees said that the front line was 5 to 6 kilometers away.
Four of the employees said that seven of their co-workers died on the spot and that the eighth – from Bangladesh – died from his wounds about 10 days later in a Tripoli hospital. The UAE has not publicly commented on its role in the attack or offered compensation for the civilian losses.
The UAE’s sustained military support for the LAAF, an eastern armed group with a well-established record of serious laws of war and human rights abuses, risks making the UAE complicit in these abuses and could expose it to scrutiny by international investigations, Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch wrote to UAE authorities on April 17, 2020 requesting information about any investigation they may have conducted into the drone strikes of November 18 and any steps taken to minimize civilian harm; as of the time of publication we received no response.
According to media, UN, and other reports, the UAE has carried out at least five other strikes that resulted in civilian casualties since April 2019. These include a July attack against a migrant detention center in Tajoura, near Tripoli, that killed at least 50 migrants and asylum seekers of various nationalities. In addition to drones, the UAE has supplied the LAAF with weapons, ammunition, and other combat materials such as armored vehicles, in violation of a 2011 UN Security Council arms embargo that prohibits such transfers, according to reports from the UN Panel of Experts on Libya.
An administrative employee who was at the factory on the day of the strike said that five missiles struck the factory compound a few minutes apart during working hours. He said the first struck next to a warehouse hangar. Although the building was damaged, no one was killed or wounded. But, he said, a group of workers in the hangar were frightened and ran toward the open fields. The second missile appeared to target them and killed three. The third missile hit another group of fleeing workers, killing one. A fourth missile targeted a cement truck in the compound, killing one person. He said the fifth hit a nearby car whose driver was preparing to drive one of the wounded Bangladeshi workers to a hospital, killing them both.
Accounts by the three injured employees were consistent with the administrative employee’s account and corroborated the sequence of events. All three had been wounded by missile shrapnel. One of the workers, 31, a Chadian national, whose left knee and ankle had been hit with missile fragments from the second missile, said that he fled the factory with a group of workers when the first missile struck:
A group of us ran out of the factory toward the open fields out of fear, after we heard the first missile strike. We were a group of seven or eight people. As we were running the second missile struck and three Libyans were killed by that missile. I was among the five others injured. There was a lot of blood. I crouched next to a wall until someone reached me and I was taken to a hospital. I needed surgery and spent a total of 12 days in a private clinic in Al-Zawiyah Street, in Tripoli.
He and another worker, a 25-year-old Chadian, said that there was no military presence at the factory compound and that the closest point where members of armed groups were present was a mosque some 1.5 km away that had been converted into a field hospital for wounded fighters. A third worker, 29, from Bangladesh, said that on November 27, 10 Bangladeshi workers from the factory were repatriated.
Human Rights Watch documented remnants of at least four Blue Arrow-7 (BA-7) laser-guided missiles fired from Wing Loong-II drone, both Chinese manufactured. Remnants seen by Human Rights Watch included distinctive wing brackets, servos – error sensing mechanisms – and gas cylinders specific to the Blue Arrow-7 missile. These remnants were identical to separate remnants of Blue Arrow-7 missiles documented in an earlier attack on a field hospital near Tripoli in July. According to the December 2019 report of the UN Panel of Experts of the Libya Sanctions Committee, “[T]he BA-7 air-to-surface missile is ballistically paired to be delivered by the Wing Loong II UCAV, and by no other aviation asset identified in Libya to date.” The Panel of Experts report cites Jane’s Defense Weekly as saying that the Blue Arrow-7 “is only in operational use in three countries: China, Kazakhstan and United Arab Emirates.”
These weapons were transferred from China and first spotted on satellite imagery by defense analysts while being operated in the region in late 2017.
UAE personnel operate these drones in support of the LAAF, according to the report of the Panel of Experts. Panel investigations confirmed that these drones and missiles were not directly supplied from the manufacturer or by the country of manufacture and found that the UAE is not complying with the Libya arms embargo imposed by the UN “for the post-delivery transfer of Wing Loong II UCAV and Blue Arrow (BA-7) systems to Libya.”
The same type of drone and missiles were reportedly used in a January 5 attack on a military college in al-Hadba, Tripoli, killing at least 30 military cadets and injuring 33 more. The Government of National Accord blamed the LAAF for the attack, but the LAAF denied responsibility. Human Rights Watch could not independently verify if armed groups were using the college compound for military purposes.
The Libyan National Center for Disease Control said its Reference Laboratory in Tripoli had run tests on 55 samples and all of them tested negative, which made Libya register no new Coronavirus cases over the last five days.
So far, Libya’s COVID-19 cases have reached 61, 18 recovered and two dead, according to the Libyan National Center for Disease Control.
As part of her continued efforts to bring an end to the ongoing fighting in Libya and seek a political solution for the Libyan crisis through reaching out to all Libyan interlocutors, the Acting Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Stephanie Williams discussed latest developments in Libya in a telephone conversation with the HoR Speaker Aguila Saleh.
The discussion also touched on Speaker Saleh’s recently announced initiative, which Williams considered a positive sign.
Acting SRSG welcomed all initiatives that include everyone, seek to end the fighting and the division and call for the return to the political dialog within the framework of the Berlin conference’s outcomes.
She also stressed the importance of listening to Libyans’ calls for a humanitarian truce during the holy month of Ramadan and the resumption of the political process as soon as possible to put an end to the ongoing war for the sake of all Libyans.
The Libyan Presidential Council addressed a letter to the head of the state’s Housing and Infrastructure Board (HIB) approving residential construction project to house families displaced by war.
