A picture of the men posted on Facebook Twelve men are facing mutilation and execution for allegedly being gay, after an extremist Libyan Islamist militia captured them at a private party. Gay Star News reports the men were having a private party in Ain Zara, a suburb of Tripoli, when the militia captured them, late on Thursday night. The militia group has posted pictures of them on Facebook, with the Quranic call 'there is no power but the power of Allah!' The militia Facebook page entitled as the ‘special deterrence unit’ boasted that the men were captured doing the ‘practices of the people of Lot’ and that they are to be mutilated and executed. The picture of the men received 121 likes, 118 shares, and mainly violent comments such as ‘flog them hard!', ‘let them see bullets!’, ‘free Libya! [ie from gays]’, ‘ride them like camels’ and so on, Gay Star News reports. It says Human Rights Watch Libya left a comment saying the organisation hopes the men will not be treated inhumanely and called upon the militia to hand the men to the civil authorities. Gay activists say police are often powerless in Libya, where the more than 250 militias take the law into their own hands Libya's Gaddafi-era Islamist criminal code prohibits all sexual activity outside marriage. Private homosexual acts between consenting adults are punishable with up to five years' imprisonment. Public discussion of homosexuality is also prohibited. In February this year a Libyan delegate outraged a UN human rights panel by claiming that homosexuals threaten the future of the human race.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Tuesday, 27th November 2012 - 10:12am