Mr. Moreno-Ocampo issued arrest warrants last month against Mr. Qaddafi, his son Seif al-Islam and intelligence chief Abdullah al-Sanussi. ICC judges are to announce in days whether they agree to the charges.
The Libyan government does not recognize the international court's jurisdiction.
Ok,so it's not, as the Washington Post made it seem to its readers, an original report from an Arabic language publication. It's simply them carrying a report from the European wire service Agence France-Press (France being one of the leading members of the coalition seeking to drive Qaddafi out), which in turn was just dutifully reporting what Moreno-Ocampo said at his press conference at the UN. No indication that anyone expressed any healthy skepticism.
But look. Here's the very same news service Agence France-Press, as published in the Australian paper the Herald-Sun, the next day:
A UN human rights investigator has cast doubts over claims by the chief ICC prosecutor of evidence that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had ordered mass rapes.
The International Criminal Court's Luis Moreno-Ocampo had said today that there was evidence the Libyan authorities bought "Viagra-type" medicines and gave them to troops as part of the official rape policy.
But Cherif Bassiouni, who is leading a UN rights inquiry into the situation in Libya, suggested that the claim was part of a "massive hysteria."
Mr Bassiouni told journalists that he had heard those claims when he visited rebel-held eastern Libya. But when he went to Tripoli, "the same story comes up."
"This time it's the government people telling us, 'you know what? The opponents have a policy of rape, we have discovered that they are giving out contraceptives and Viagra pills'," he recounted.
...The investigator also cited the case of a woman who claimed to have sent out 70,000 questionnaires and received 60,000 responses, of which 259 reported sexual abuse.
However, when the investigators asked for these questionnaires, they never received them.
"But she's going around the world telling everybody about it " so now she got that information to Ocampo and Ocampo is convinced that here we have a potential 259 women who have responded to the fact that they have been sexually abused," Mr Bassiouni said.
He also pointed out that it did not appear to be credible that the woman was able to send out 70,000 questionnaires in March when the postal service was not functioning.
Nevertheless, the investigator said his team will examine the claims.
"We're going to go back and we're going to look at it," he said.
For the moment, the team has only heard of three cases.
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