BENGHAZI: A Libyan court has jailed 12 officials in connection with the collapse of a series of dams in Derna last year that killed thousands of the city's residents, the attorney general said on Sunday.
Officials who were responsible for managing the country's dams were sentenced to between 9 and 27 years in prison by the Court of Appeal in Derna. Four officials were acquitted.
Derna, a coastal town of 125,000, was devastated by massive flooding from Storm Daniel last September.
Thousands of people have been killed and thousands more are missing in floods that have breached dams, swept away buildings and destroyed entire neighborhoods.
Tripoli's general prosecutor said three of the defendants had been ordered to “return the money obtained from illegal profits,” according to a statement that did not give the defendants' names or positions.
“The convicted officials were accused of negligence, premeditated murder and waste of public money,” a judicial source in Derna told Reuters by phone, adding that they had the right to appeal the verdicts.
A World Bank, United Nations and European Union report in January said the deadly flash floods in Derna constituted a climate and environmental disaster that required $1.8 billion in recovery and reconstruction funding.
The report said the collapse of the dams was partly due to their construction based on outdated hydrological information and partly the result of poor maintenance and management problems during more than a decade of conflict in Libya.
After the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011, Libya has been divided between rival power centers ruling the east and west since 2014.
