Libya's Haftar faces fresh US lawsuit for Tripoli drone strike that killed 26

Libya's Khalifa Haftar faces a fresh US lawsuit from the Libyan-American Alliance (LAA), accusing the Gaddafi-era general of deliberately bombing a military college in the capital of Tripoli in January 2020. 

The LAA is representing three families whose sons were killed in a drone strike that took place on January 4th while the young men were studying and training in Tripoli, according to a press conference held on Thursday with the legal team.  

The attack itself left 26 cadets dead and several others wounded.

"On January 4, 2020, a group of around fifty young unarmed cadets were attacked while marching at a military college in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. As the cadets stopped to tum their procession to the left, a missile slammed into the center of the crowd and exploded. Twenty-six of the cadets perished," the lawsuit says. 

"The airstrike that killed them was launched under Haftar's authority."

The legal proceedings are not the first Haftar has faced in his former country of residence for alleged crimes committed in Libya. 

In a previous lawsuit in July, a US judge ordered the military chief to compensate Libyan plaintiffs who allege he ordered the torture and extrajudicial killings of their family members.

The federal judge in the state of Virginia, where Haftar lived before returning to Libya, ruled that he had not cooperated with the court and that by "default" was ordered to pay damages to the families.

Filed in 2019 and 2020, the civil lawsuits argued that Haftar, as head of the eastern-based Libyan National Army, authorized the indiscriminate bombings of civilians during his unsuccessful 2019 campaign to take Tripoli, resulting in the death of the plaintiff's family members.

Haftar was pursued under a 1991 US law, the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows for civil lawsuits against anyone who, acting in an official capacity for a foreign nation, commits acts of torture and/or extrajudicial killings.

The same law is being used in the new lawsuit, suggesting a precedent has been set for other victims to come forward.