Libya rejects claims it cannot try Abdullah al-Senussi "Our courts are very good, even excellent, especially in Tripoli, and we are able to carry out his trial according to international standards," Ali Hmeida Ashur, the Libyan justice minister, told the French news agency AFP. We expect diplomats and government officials to convince all parties of the need to try Senussi in Libya. The ICC is only meant to try cases in which member states are unwilling or unable to prosecute them themselves. Libya's willingness is not in question but the uncertain fate surrounding Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who was captured last November, is unlikely to encourage confidence in Libya among lawyers at the court's headquarters in The Hague. The militia which seized Col Gaddafi's heir apparent has refused requests to transfer their captive to Tripoli and is instead holding him at its headquarters in the town of Zintan. Militia leaders say they will stage their own trial. The prospect of Senussi standing trial at the notoriously slow ICC, which only secured its first conviction in 10 years last week, will horrify his many victims. As Col Gaddafi's most trusted acolyte, Senussi is accused of presiding over a system of torture and extra-judicial execution that became the mainstay of a culture of terror in Libya that spanned decades. Among the most serious charges laid against him is the Abu Salim prison massacre of 1996, when some 1,200 mainly Islamist inmates were shot, bludgeoned or hacked to death. France also had a claim on the suspect, after a French court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment in 1999 after ruling that he was responsible for a bomb attack on a passenger plane over Niger 10 years earlier. Most of the 170 who died were French citizens.