The scale of the potential security crisis facing post-revolutionary Libya has been fully exposed after the Daily Telegraph discovered a huge Gaddafi weapons dump left unguarded in the capital, Tripoli.
Thousands of abandoned anti-personnel mines, loose and in crates, lie in a disused industrial area close to the Khamis Brigade Barracks on the outskirts of Tripoli Photo: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY
By Richard Spencer, Tripoli
9:00PM BST 04 Sep 2011
Across an open field in the city's suburbs lay tens of thousands of boxes of land mines. The wooden boxes, stacked up to ten or fifteen deep under canvas covers across one side of the field, each contained six anti-personnel mines.
More boxes and scattered individual mines lay in a makeshift brieze-block outhouse. A large knapsack full of hand grenades lay open in the bucket of a large mechanical digger.
Further up the field were scattered scores of boxes of high explosives, some gaping open. Several boxes were marked Semtex and their contents appeared to be made up of the plastic explosive, once supplied to lethal effect by Col Muammar Gaddafi's Libya to the IRA. Others appeared to contain ordinary TNT.
A general in the rebels' National Liberation Army attempted to play down the importance of the find when it was put to him by The Telegraph. "We are in a situation of war," the general, Omar Hariri, said.
But Col Gaddafi in a broadcast last week threatened that in order to return to Tripoli in triumph he was prepared to order a long insurgency. Although rebel leaders insist that "Libya is not Iraq" the potential for destabilising guerrilla war was already high due to the huge number of weapons present in the country.
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A former supply officer in Col Gaddafi's army told The Telegraph last week that it had 15 millions light arms - Kalashnikov and FN rifles and Beretta sub-machine guns - even before the rebels brought in their own weapons.
Western officials have also expressed concern about the possibility of weapons being smuggled across Libya's open desert borders to militant groups, some allied to al-Qaeda, operating in north and west Africa.
The Telegraph is not revealing the whereabouts of the arms dump for security reasons. A nearby resident, Mohammed Abdul Ahmed, said that they had watched soldiers from Libya's feared Khamis Brigades bring the explosives in over the course of the civil war and lived in fear of the site being struck by NATO bombers.
"Luckily the NATO bombers were very precise," he said.
Rebel soldiers had come and inspected the site, he said, and left a guard behind, but there was no sign of any guard when The Telegraph visited. A gate to the field was locked but the wall was low and gave out at one end, meaning only a small hillock had to be climbed to enter the field.
The only warning to passers-by was a green scrawl on the wall saying "Beware - mines" in Arabic.
As well as the land mines there was extensive and unused mine detection equipment, including robots, which invoices found nearby suggested were sold to the regime by British and German firms.
The documents linked the find to the Khamis Brigades.
In another compound nearby, whose gate was left open, stood a warehouse containing hundreds of boxes of rocket-propelled grenades and tank shells, also unguarded.
"Gaddafi left weapons and mines but we do have group of military engineers who are specialist in finding and digging out these weapons," said Gen.
Hariri. "It's only a matter of time."
The European Union representative to Libya, Agostino Miozzo, warned at the weekend that while the rebels had control over the eastern border with Libya and would soon be able to take control of the sea, the southern and western borders were open to smugglers.
He said securing weapons was a priority for the new government, after the hunt for Col Gaddafi. Of The Telegraph's find he said: "I'm not surprised - Gaddafi was filling the country with weapons. Probably only the intelligence services know the number or potential number of arms that are in Libya."
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