Masked Men Try To Storm Libya’s Audit Bureau In Tripoli

UNSMIL says force was used in an attempt to install a disputed deputy head at the body that safeguards public funds.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Masked men in military uniform tried to storm the headquarters of Libya’s financial oversight agency on Wednesday, in an operation the country’s UN mission described as an “unacceptable” attempt to install a senior employee by force.

Footage circulated on social media showed a group of men in beige fatigues and hats gathered at the gate of the Tripoli offices of the Audit Bureau, the institution charged with safeguarding public funds. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attempt, and the Audit Bureau made no immediate comment.

The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) said in a statement that “force and intimidation” had been used to try to install a disputed deputy head of the institution.

“The use of force to impose appointments to sovereign institutions is wholly unacceptable and represents a grave threat to the rule of law and the independence and integrity of Libya’s sovereign institutions,” the mission said. “Such actions are particularly concerning when directed at an independent oversight institution entrusted with safeguarding the use of public funds and ensuring accountability in the management of state resources.”

Libya has known little stability since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that ousted Muammar Gaddafi, and has been divided between rival eastern and western camps since 2014. Armed factions, some holding official status, have long vied for control of territory and financial revenues in the capital, at times raiding institutional buildings and abducting staff.

The targeting of the Audit Bureau follows a familiar pattern in which authority in Tripoli is contested not through institutions but through the men at the gate. What distinguishes this episode is the objective: not a ministry, a cash allocation or a detained rival, but the leadership of the office that audits them all.

Libya’s oil wealth makes the audit function the country’s most consequential piece of unpaid real estate. Rival governments survive on competing claims to revenue, and an oversight body that can certify — or refuse to certify — those claims is an asset worth capturing. An appointment imposed at gunpoint does not merely install an official; it hollows out the evidentiary record on which every future accountability claim, domestic or international, depends.

UNSMIL’s language — “sovereign institutions,” “integrity,” “independence” — signals the mission’s concern that the quarrel is no longer confined to who governs, but whether the institutions that measure governance survive at all. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and no word from the Audit Bureau itself.