The Libyans Ignored as Qaddafi Gets International Rehab

Read and be shocked:

Shuaib Alabied cuddles his baby daughter but looks distracted. Clearly his mind is elsewhere.

The former car salesman from Tripoli is seeking asylum in Britain after fleeing Libya with his pregnant wife last year.

He is a Berber, racially different from the Arabs who rule Libya and he once belonged to the Amazighian Party which campaigns for cultural autonomy. The party - like all political groupings in Libya - is banned by the state.

In September 2006, Shuaib was arrested at his garage, taken to the police station and ordered to name other members of his party.

"The officer said to me: 'We have ways of making you talk'," says Shuaib. "They told me someone called Washi was coming."

Washi was a plain clothes officer in the Ain Zara prison in the capital run by Libya's security service. Shuaib describes him as a muscular, tall man with a crew cut. He says he slapped him, dragged him into a cell and subjected him to a brutal rape.

Shuaib's claim is supported by evidence supplied by the Medical Commission for Victims of Torture. He was kept in a dirty cell for three and a half months. When he was eventually freed, he was determined to get out of Libya. So he fled across the desert to Tunisia and then via Turkey reached the UK with his wife.

When the authorities realised Shuaib had escaped, they arrested his father. Mr Alebied is still in prison but nobody knows where since no-one in the family has been able to speak to him since the police took him away.

Read on to learn how the EU might grant these individuals asylum, but pressures them not to sue Libya in international court.