The chaos at the heart of the Libyan government was underlined on Thursday when it admitted its own security forces had kidnapped the daughter of Muammar Gaddafi's former spy chief from police custody this week.
Anoud al-Senussi, 22, was snatched in an armed ambush of a convoy of Libya's judicial police escorting her to Tripoli airport.
Four days after the prime minister, Ali Zaidan, vowed to track down her abductors, his government's elite gendarmerie, the supreme security committee, admitted that it had carried out the raid. An SSC statement said Anoud, daughter of Abdullah al-Senussi, who is due to stand trial for war crimes this month, had been taken "for her own protection".
Hanan Salah, of Human Rights Watch, who spoke to Anoud al-Senussi last month, said the episode was "stranger than fiction".
A video of Anoud in captivity was released in which she claimed she had not been kidnapped and the SSC was treating her "like a sister" at an undisclosed location.
She had been released from a Tripoli jail after serving a 10-month sentence for entering the country illegally, apparently to visit her imprisoned father. The abduction – in which one police unit snatched a high-profile charge from another – underlines the parlous state of a country facing economic catastrophe, with most oil ports blockaded by armed protesters and the army battling radical militias in Benghazi.
"What happened is a shambles," said Hassan el-Amin, a former dissident who fled to the UK this year, resigning as head of congress's human rights committee, after receiving death threats. "There is no control. Nobody in particular holds the cards."
Abdullah al-Senussi and Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi's son, are due to stand trial in a fortnight, in breach of rulings by the international criminal court that both should be sent to The Hague.
Amnesty International joined Human Rights Watch in condemning the kidnapping. The former spy chief's British lawyers said it underlined the inability of Libya to guarantee a fair trial.
"She was ambushed by heavily armed gunmen and kidnapped just yards from the prison," Ben Emmerson QC and Rodney Dixon said in a statement. "It is clear that Mr al-Senussi is not safe and cannot receive a fair and genuine trial in Libya."
Zaidan's spokeswoman said she had no information about the incident.