Mr Senussi was seen as late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's right-hand man

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Libya Crisis

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Dangers lurk

Should Sirte be rebuilt?

War victims' care scandal

Former Libyan intelligence chief Abdallah al-Senussi has been charged in Mauritania with illegally entering the country, officials say.

Mr Senussi, who fled Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, was held at Nouakchott airport after flying in from Morocco in March.

Both Libya and the International Criminal Court want him extradited to face trial for crimes against humanity.

Mauritanian officials say he faces trial for using false travel documents.

A judicial source told AFP news agency he had been placed in a specially prepared prison cell ahead of his trial.

The interim Libyan government has said it wants him back on Libyan soil so he can stand trial for numerous allegations of murder and human rights abuses while he was Gaddafi's head of intelligence.

Nicknamed “the butcher”, Mr Senussi was Gaddafi's brother-in-law and has been described as one of his closest aides.

He has been implicated in the massacre in 1996 of more than 1,000 inmates at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

In March, soon after Mr Senussi's arrest, Libya's Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur said Mauritania had agreed to hand him over. Mauritanian officials have said no decision has been made on his extradition.

Interpol has issued an international “red notice” call for his arrest at Libya's request.

Mr Senussi is also wanted on a 2011 ICC arrest warrant in connection with the violent suppression of protests during last year's Libyan uprising that toppled the late Col Gaddafi.

In addition, he is sought by the authorities in France after a court there sentenced him to life in prison for his involvement in a 1989 attack on a French plane that killed 170 people.

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This was the first time a local council election has been held in Benghazi since the 1960s

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Libya Crisis

Divisive bid

Dangers lurk

Should Sirte be rebuilt?

War victims' care scandal

Residents in Benghazi, the city where the Libyan uprising began, have voted in historic local elections.

More than 400 people contested seats on the 44-member local council, even though the remit of local authorities has yet to be set.

This was the first time such elections have been held in the city since the 1960s and turnout was high.

National elections are expected to be held in June. Until then, the mandate of local councils will remain unclear.

The BBC's Rana Jawad in Libya says people in Benghazi were excited and motivated to be taking part in a political process.

Social networking sites were awash with pictures of people showing their inked fingers to prove they voted and some polling stations had to stay open for an extra hour to meet demand.

Results of the election are due on Monday.

‘We feel valued’

One voter, 22 year-old law student Bilal Bettamer, said there were more women than men voting in his area.

“I personally voted for a woman but there are only two female candidates,” he added.

Teaching assistant Ahmed al-Meina, 26, said: “This is the first democratic experience for us in Benghazi… it feels like we are now valued, all my friends voted.”

He noted however that the council's mandate is unclear, even to the candidates themselves. Until the national assembly sets a budget, no one will know how much money or influence local authorities will wield.

Al-Ameen Belhaj, an official in the National Transitional Council (NTC), said councils will be running things like transport and communications, “but we have not yet differentiated between the mandate of these councils and the national assembly that is due to be elected in June”.

“We might see new elections for local councils after the constituent assembly is formed,” he added.

Security concerns

Tensions between regional powers in the east of Libya, where the revolution began, and the NTC in Tripoli in the west have been bubbling since the fall of Col Gaddafi last year.

Eastern cities like Benghazi felt marginalised under the old regime and are wary of the same thing happening again, so many residents are reluctant to cede too much power to the government in the capital.

In March, tribal leaders and militia commanders in eastern Libya tried to set up a semi-autonomous region called Barqa. They have called on their supporters to boycott the national elections next month.

Bilal Bettamer, an ex-fighter and law student who voted in Benghazi, said the most important thing for him was to disarm the militias and strengthen the official police and army.

“A lot of the ex-fighters want to give up their weapons but they don't see any real authority to hand them to,” he said.

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Candidates have recently woken up to the need to target the female vote

But the Baseera Centre has no special reason to pander to the military. Its research is funded by the independent, liberal-leaning, al-Masry al-Yowm newspaper.

It is run by Magued Osman, who was minister of communications in the months following the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak, someone with no strong reason to favour Ahmed Shafiq.

Magued Osman believes the dramatic differences in poll numbers may be the result of different sampling methods. His polls take a sample of 2,200 voters, polled by telephone – both landlines and mobile phones.

He explains how they are still learning about polling in Egypt. For example, calls at different times of day produce different results. Housewives tend to answer the phone more in the daytime. Landlines are more prevalent in the cities, and there is a higher proportion of mobile phones in rural areas.

Fluid politics

Public opinion appears to be very fluid as well. “Political life is very dynamic. There are lots of changes,” explained Magued Osman. He believes it is important that his polls are conducted in the space of just one day. The other organisations take several days to complete their polls.

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Election candidates

Seen as front-runners:

Ahmed Shafiq: former commander of the air force and briefly PM during February 2011 protests.

Amr Moussa: Former foreign minister and ex-head of Arab League.

Mohammed Mursi: heads Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.

Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh: Leading Brotherhood figure forced to leave after announcing candidacy last year.

Other candidates include Islamic thinker Muhammad al-Awwa; leading judge Hisham al-Bastawisi; socialist MP Abu-al-Izz al-Hariri; left-wing rights activist Khalid Ali; co-founder of Nasserist Karama party Hamdin Sabbahi

Election: The 13 candidates

Many observers believe that the the two participants in the first presidential debate, Amr Moussa and Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh, both suffered because of lacklustre television performances.

Ironically they were chosen to take part, ahead of the other candidates, because they were the top two candidates in the polls – hence a late swing to Ahmed Shafiq, and to a lesser extent Mohammed Mursi and Hamdeen Sabbahi.

Another crucial factor is the very high proportion of undecided voters. In the latest poll for the Baseera Centre, 37.4% of voters were undecided.

Magued Osman says the highest number of undecideds are in rural areas, primarily women. Some of the candidates have recently picked up on the need to win the female vote.

Ahmed Shafiq was the first to promise to appoint a woman vice-president. Abdoul Moneim Aboul Fotouh held a special women's rally in Cairo earlier in the week, and a liberal-minded woman is one of his top political advisers.

Mustafa Kamel al-Sayyid, politics professor at Cairo University, who is also connected with the Baseera Centre, also says the fluctuations in the polls reflect an evolving situation.

“The situation changes from one week to the next,” he says. “Ahmed Shafiq came up in the last week. It really reflects the state of opinion from one week to another. So I don't think there is any political bias (in the polls).”

Urban vs rural

Ahmed Naguib Kamha, of the al-Ahram Centre, says they get different results because they do face-to-face interviews, not phone polls.

“I prefer to use the methodology of face-to-face polls. It is more reliable for the cultural base of Egyptian society,” he argues.

Many Egyptians believe the country's military rulers are trying to manipulate the election result

For example, while many people have mobile phones, richer people often have multiple phones, he says.

He also believes conducting face-to-face interviews is the reason his sample has far fewer undecided voters: 18-25% of those questioned, compared to 37.4% in the latest Baseera poll.

By spending time with people, he explains, they are much more willing to give their opinion.

Perhaps the most sobering lesson from the parliamentary elections last year is how little most “opinion formers” in Cairo know about public opinion across this vast country.

The strong showing of the hardline Islamists known as Salafists in the rural areas came as a particular surprise to many people.

Perhaps that should be expected in a system which has never before known full democracy, or indeed any means of reliably sounding out public opinion. Egypt has been run from the top down since the time of the pharaohs.

Another first: Egyptians are no longer afraid to give their opinions to strangers, and to express independent ideas. And despite the legacy of years of cynicism, many are genuinely excited about the election.

The best guess is that this election will be decided outside Cairo, in the rural areas, especially those of Upper Egypt.

And a very large number of the voters have not made up their minds, or may yet switch their choice.

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Obituary: Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted over the 1988 Lockerbie bombing above Scotland, which killed 270 people, has died at home in Libya, his brother has told news agencies.

Megrahi, 59, was convicted by a special court in the Netherlands in 2001.

He was released from prison in Scotland in 2009 on compassionate grounds. He was suffering from cancer and was said to have only months to live.

When he returned to the Libyan capital, he received a hero's welcome.

His brother Abdulhakim said on Sunday that Megrahi's health had deteriorated quickly and he died at home in Tripoli.

He told the AFP news agency that Megrahi died at 13:00 local time (11:00 GMT).

Last month, Megrahi's son said his father had been taken to hospital for blood transfusions.

Shortly before being freed, Megrahi dropped his second appeal against his conviction.

His release sparked the fury of many of the relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie disaster.

Last August after the fall of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi, Megrahi was reported to be “in and out of a coma” at his home in Tripoli.

There have been calls for him to be returned to jail in the UK or tried in the US.

But shortly after they toppled Colonel Gaddafi, Libyan rebel leaders said they would not extradite Megrahi or any other Libyan.

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