Libyan delegation to visit Beirut over Sadr's disappearance case

A delegation from the Libyan Ministry of Justice is expected to travel to Beirut in the coming days to revive a memorandum of understanding from 2014 regarding the disappearance of Lebanese Shiite cleric imam Moussa Sadr in 1978.

The delegation will meet with the Lebanese justice ministry and the committee overseeing the case of the son of Libya's former leader Moammar Gadhafi, a Lebanese judicial official said.

Human Rights Watch had called on Lebanon on Tuesday to release Hannibal Gadhafi, saying he had been held on "spurious charges" for eight years.

The official slammed the HRW report as "biased and one-sided", telling AFP it was based solely on "information obtained from Hannibal Gadhafi's defense team".

Gadhafi is "detained in a purely judicial matter", the source continued, charging that he was responsible for prisons during his father's rule, "including the one in which the imam was held".

Lebanon in 2015 arrested and accused Gadhafi of withholding information about the disappearance of Sadr.

But HRW said he was only two years old at the time the cleric disappeared, and accused Lebanon of subjecting him to an "apparent arbitrary detention on spurious charges".

"Spending eight years in pre-trial detention makes a mockery of Lebanon's already strained judicial system," the group's Hanan Salah said in a statement.

In August, Beirut received a letter from Libyan authorities demanding Gadhafi's release, but a judicial source told AFP that he would not be freed before Tripoli revealed information about Sadr's disappearance.

Later that month, Amal movement chief Nabih Berri accused Libya of "failing to cooperate" with the Lebanese judiciary and "concealing" information about the case.