Umar Muhayshi | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | c. 1941 Misrata,Italian Libya |
| Died | c. January, 1984 Abu Salim prison[1] |
| Cause of death | Blunt trauma |
| Political party | Libyan Revolutionary Command Council |
| Alma mater | Benghazi Military University Academy |
Umar Abdullah el-Muhayshi (Adyghe:Умар-Абдилахь,romanized: Wumar-Abdilah; 1941 – January, 1984), alsotransliterated asOmar al-Meheshi, was aLibyan army officer and a member of theLibyan Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) that ruledLibya after the1969 Libyan coup d'état.
Born to a family ofCircassian andTurkish origin,[2] Umar Muhayshi was said to be a childhood friend ofMuammar Gaddafi and later a member of the group of army officers called theFree Officers Movement that brought ousted the royal regime in Libya on 1 September 1969.[3][4] He was one of the twelve members of theRCC, headed byMuammar Gaddafi. He was promoted to the rank of Major after therevolution. After the establishment of theLibyan People's Court in October 1969, he represented the attorney-general at the court.[5] He wasMinister of Treasury in 1970.[6] He was later appointed Minister of Planning and took issue with Gaddafi's wasting of Libyan resources onpan-Arab andanti-colonialist causes.[7][8] Instead, he wanted Libya to invest its oil revenues in agriculture and industry, particularly heavy industries, such as iron and steel, in his hometownMisrata.[9]
In August 1975, Gaddafi's regime announced that an attemptedcoup d'état had been forestalled. All thirteen leading conspirators were members of the Free Officers Movement and four of them (Muhayshi,Bashir Houadi,Abdul Munim el Houni and Awad Hamza) were members of the RCC.[10] By that time Muhayshi had already fled toTunis.[8] Most of the other supposed conspirators were executed in March 1976.[4] In an interview withAl-Ahram, Muhayshi denied attempting a coup and stated that he had merely tried to "correct Gaddafi's error" and had asked Gaddafi to resign. In the same interview, Muhayshi referred to Gaddafi as a "dangerous psychopath."[9]
According to declassified diplomatic telegram sent from the US Embassy in Egypt to theState Department, Egyptian PresidentAnwar Sadat was using Muhayshi's radio broadcast to discredit Gaddafi and most of Gaddafi's RCC (with the exception ofAbdessalam Jalloud) had turned against him by 1976. In light of this development, Sadat's government considered several options: forming a Libyan government-in-exile headed by Muhayshi, usingSaudi money to fund anti-Gaddafi dissidents inside Libya, or creating a Muhayshi-led government on Libyan territory (near the Libya-Egypt border), where Muhayshi could then appeal for an Egyptian "intervention" to remove Gaddafi by force either through arrest or assassination.[11]
Between 1976 and 1983, Muhayshi lived inEgypt,Tunisia andMorocco. While he was in Egypt, some sources said that Gaddafi's regime tried to assassinate Muhayshi more than once.[12] Most notably, Gaddafi allegedly offered ex-CIA officersEdwin P. Wilson andFrank Terpil $1 million in 1976 to recruit a group ofCuban exiles involved inBay of Pigs Invasion to assassinate Muhayshi.[13][14][15] The Cuban exiles initially thought the target of the assassination would beCarlos the Jackal, then living in Libya under Gaddafi's protection, and they refused to partake in the plot when the target turned out to be Muhayshi.[16] Wilson was sentenced to 32 years in prison over his ties to Gaddafi, but was acquitted in 1983 on the counts of murder conspiracy and conspiracy to solicit murder in the Muhayshi case.[7][17] Terpil never stood trial as he remained a fugitive for the rest of his life.
Muhayshi remained inCairo until PresidentAnwar Sadat announced his intention to visitJerusalem in 1979, which Muhayshi publicly and vehemently opposed, resulting in the freezing of his activities and his expulsion from Egypt to Morocco in July 1980.[18]
In 1983, while Muhayshi was in Morocco, then ruled by KingHassan II, the Moroccan authorities delivered Muhayshi to Gaddafi in exchange for Gaddafi promising to cut off financial aid to thePolisario Front.[19][4] Muhayshi was murdered in January 1984 undertorture by Sa'eed Rashid, according toAbdel Rahman Shalgham.[20][21] According to another account, he was allegedly stomped to death on the airport runway as soon as he landed inTripoli.[4][9]
 | This article about a Libyan politician is astub. You can help Wikipedia byexpanding it. |