BENGHAZI: A Libyan court has detained 12 officials in connection with the collapse of a series of dams in Derna last year, killing thousands of the city's residents, the attorney general said on Sunday.
The officials responsible for managing the country's dams were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 9 to 27 years by the Derna Court of Appeal. Four officials were acquitted.
Derna, a coastal city of 125,000 inhabitants, was devastated by massive flooding caused by Storm Daniel last September.
Thousands have died and thousands more are missing because the floods have broken dams, washed away buildings and destroyed entire neighborhoods.
The Attorney General in Tripoli said three of the defendants were ordered to “return money they had obtained through illicit income,” according to a statement. The names and positions of the defendants were not mentioned.
“The convicted officials are accused of negligence, premeditated murder and wasting public funds,” a judicial source in Derna told Reuters by phone, adding that they had the right to appeal the verdicts.
A report published in January by the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union said the deadly flash floods in Derna were a climate and environmental disaster that would require $1.8 billion to rebuild and clean up.
The report says the collapse of the dams was partly due to their design being based on outdated hydrological data, but also partly due to poor maintenance and management problems during Libya's more than decade-long conflict.
Libya has been divided between rival power centers in the east and west since 2014, after Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
