The authorities have refused to give the bodies of the five executed activists to their families for burial, fearing that ceremonies could lead to protests.
As the Qaddafi government started executing student activists in the mid-1970s, Mr. Tarhouni remembered that he and other Libyan students had to twist Mr. Koussa's arm to sign a letter "that basically said Qaddafi was a murderer".
In the suit, Royal Dutch Shell was accused of assisting the Nigerian government in torturing and, through sham trials, executing Ogoni activists who had threatened to disrupt Shell's operations because of the devastating health and environmental effects of unregulated drilling practices.
Some of the finest medieval Arabic and Persian poets and grammarians were atheists (though several were also famously executed).Young activists, albeit often exiled, such as Mr Ghazzali, have become more vociferous about their right not to believe in a God.
Mr. Astiz, 59, nicknamed the "Blond Angel of Death," was convicted for his role in executing human rights activists in 1977; they were tortured at the Navy Mechanics School, known as ESMA, and then dropped from navy airplanes into the South Atlantic.
He said that instead of executing the five activists when there were still so many unanswered questions about the case against them, the authorities should have been pursuing the crimes committed last summer against detainees who were arrested in the postelection protests.
In December, Isis executed RBSS activist Naji Jerf, whose last work 'Islamic State in Aleppo' was a documentary exposing human rights violations committed in the city.
Fourteen years ago, the Nigerian junta was preparing to execute Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa for his organizing activities against the environmental devastation being visited on his people by oil development -- the Shell Corporation in particular.
Too cautiously, his critics say: he did not get tough with Nigeria until its ruler, Sani Abacha, had already executed minority-rights activists.
In the city of Kamyaran, in Kurdistan Province, the hometown of one of the activists executed on Sunday, the authorities imposed heavy security to prevent possible protests over the executions, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.
