US Captures Al-Qaida Suspect, Libya Denounces Capture

The U.S. has captured Libyan citizen Abu Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaida operative indicted on charges of planning the terrorist group's 1998 bombing of two American Embassies in East Africa.

Abu Anas was seized by U.S. commandos over the weekend and is being interrogated while in military custody on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean sea. He will eventually be sent to New York for criminal prosecution, The New York Times reports. 

Abu Anas is said to possess two decades worth of information about al-Qaida, from its inception under Osama bin Laden to the present day. The strategy of holding Abu Anas and questioning him for useful intelligence without a lawyer present was used successfully with the U.S. capture of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a former military commander with the Somali terrorist group Al Shabab. He was captured by the American military in the Gulf of Aden in 2011 and interrogated aboard a Navy ship for two months without being advised of his rights or being provided with a lawyer. 

Warsame was eventually told of his rights and then waived them. He was questioned for a week, then sent to New York, where he later pled guilty. He has since been cooperating with the U.S. government, and provided information about his co-conspirators, which include "high-level international terrorist operatives."

Abu Anas, 49, who was born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, was indicted in 2000 on charges of plotting with bin Laden to attack United States forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia, as well as in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people.

Anas is an al-Qaida computer expert who helped conduct surveillance of the embassy in Nairobi, according to evidence from the bombings. During the investigation, authorities discovered an al-Qaida terrorism manual at his residence in Manchester, England. The manual is a detailed document on how to execute terrorist attacks, with references to "blasting and destroying the embassies and attacking vital economic centers"; it also endorses explosives, saying they "strike the enemy with sheer terror and fright."

On Sunday, the  Defense Department said Abu Anas was "currently lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location outside of Libya."

Libya's interim government denounced the United States on Sunday for what it called the "kidnapping of a Libyan citizen," and political officials threatened to remove the prime minister if it is discovered that the government was involved. The Libyan government denied the U.S.' contention that they were involved in the operation. 

The Libyan public is tired of the unrest that has taken hold of the country after the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. 

"There is hardly very much that is going on, except that every three or four days there is a new assassination," said Mohamed Mufti, a Western-educated physician in Benghazi. "This government seems to be suffering terminal inertia."

According to the Times, the U.S. acted after being unable to wait for the Libyan government to take power over the militias that currently hold influence and capture fugitives living in Libya. The Abu Anas raid proves that the Obama Administration is more willing to pursue its targets directly, which has prompted those suspected of carrying out the Benghazi attack last year to go into hiding, Libyan officials said. 

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the capture of Anas complied with American law, and that he was a "legal and appropriate target" for the United States.