Khaberni - A judicial source and a lawyer for one of the defendants told Reuters that a court in eastern Libya retried, on Sunday, 12 officials because of the collapse of the dams in the floods named Hurricane Daniel in 2023.
The sources explained that this came against the background of the Supreme Court's acceptance of the appeal against the verdicts issued by the Derna Court of Appeal last year.
The lawyer, who preferred not to be named, confirmed that the retrial of the defendants in the case of the Derna dams' collapse was based on the decision of the Supreme Court which accepted the appeal against the previous rulings as they were "contrary to the law", thus the verdict was overturned and the retrial was resumed.
A judicial source told Reuters, requesting anonymity as well, that the trial sessions were resumed today at the Benghazi Court of Appeal, the second-largest city in Libya. He added that at the end of the first session of the retrial, the court decided to postpone it to November 30 "while continuing the detention of the defendants".
According to a statement issued by the Public Prosecutor's office, the Derna Court of Appeals issued sentences last July ranging from nine to 27 years in prison for the officials responsible for managing the country's dam facilities, while four other officials were acquitted.
The court charged the officials with "negligence, manslaughter, and wastage of public money."
In September 2023, the coastal city of Derna in eastern Libya, which has a population of 125,000 people, experienced devastating floods due to Hurricane Daniel, resulting in thousands of deaths and the displacement of thousands of others due to the floods which led to the collapse of the dams and many buildings and devastated entire neighborhoods.
Abdelaziz Al-Jaafari, the director of the media office of the General Authority for the Search and Identification of the Missing, said that the authority received 3297 reports from families of the missing in the city of Derna while 3970 DNA samples were collected and 113 matches have been made so far, including two for Egyptian citizens and a third for a Syrian citizen.
Libya has been divided since 2014 between competing power centers in the east and west after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in an uprising supported by NATO in 2011.
