Libya's government denied reports it is responsible for drone attacks that hit an airbase in the east used by mercenaries of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner. The origin of the early Friday attack on the Al-Kharruba airbase, 150km (90 miles) southwest of Benghazi, was unclear but it caused no casualties. Army Chief of Staff General Mohamad al-Haddad denied the Tripoli-based authorities had anything to do with the raid. "None of our aircraft targeted any site in the east," al-Haddad said, according to the Libyan news website Addresslibya. "These reports are aimed at stoking a new war between Libyan brothers and involving Libya in a regional conflict."

AI drone may have'hunted down' and killed soldiers in Libya without human input By Charles Q. Choi - Live Science Contributor - June 3, 2021 KARGU a Rotary Wing Attack Drone Loitering Munition System A UN report suggests that at least one autonomous drone operated by artificial intelligence (AI) may have killed people for the first time last year in Libya, without any humans consulted prior to the attack, according to a U.N. report. According to a March report from the U.N. Panel of Experts on Libya, lethal autonomous aircraft may have "hunted down and remotely engaged" soldiers and convoys fighting for Libyan general Khalifa Haftar. It's not clear who exactly deployed these killer robots, though remnants of one such machine found in Libya came from the Kargu-2 drone, which is made by Turkish military contractor STM. Landmines are essentially simple autonomous weapons -- you step on them and they blow up," Zachary Kallenborn, a research affiliate with the National Consortium for the ...

A "lethal" weaponized drone "hunted down" and "remotely engaged" human targets without its handlers' say-so during a conflict in Libya last year, according to a United Nations report first covered by New Scientist this week. Whether there were any casualties remains unclear, but if confirmed, it would likely be the first recorded death carried out by an autonomous killer robot. In March 2020, a Kargu-2 attack quadcopter, which the agency called a "lethal autonomous weapon system," targeted retreating soldiers and convoys led by Libyan National Army's Khalifa Haftar during a civil conflict with Libyan government forces. "The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true'fire, forget and find' capability," the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya wrote in the report. It remains unconfirmed whether any soldiers were killed in the attack, although the UN experts imply as much.

A "lethal" weaponized drone "hunted down a human target" without being told to for the first time, according to a UN report seen by the New Scientist. The March 2020 incident saw a KARGU-2 quadcopter autonomously attack a human during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction, led by the Libyan National Army's Khalifa Haftar, the Daily Star reported. The Turkish-built KARGU-2, a deadly attack drone designed for asymmetric warfare and anti-terrorist operations, targeted one of Haftar's soldiers while he tried to retreat, according to the paper. The drone, which can be directed to detonate on impact, was operating in a "highly effective" autonomous mode that required no human controller, the New York Post said. "The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true'fire, forget and find' capability," the report from the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya said.

Autonomous drones may have attacked humans for the first time ever, according to a United Nations report. Last year, rebels in Libya were bombarded by'unmanned combat aerial vehicles and lethal autonomous weapons systems,' the report alleges. The drones can be operated manually but in this encounter they were self-guided, using on-board cameras and machine learning to find and target enemies. No deaths were confirmed but the drones carry explosive charges and similar systems have caused'significant casualties' in other encounters. According to the March report from the United Nations Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya, Kargu-2 quadcopters were deployed in the North African nation in March 2020.

Air power has played an increasingly important role in the Libyan conflict. The relatively flat featureless desert terrain of the north and coast means that ground units are easily spotted, with few places to hide. The air forces of both the United Nations-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) and eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) use French and Soviet-era fighter jets, antiquated and poorly maintained. While manned fighter aircraft have been used, for the most part the air war has been fought by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. With nearly 1,000 air strikes conducted by UAVs, UN Special Representative to Libya Ghassan Salame called the conflict "the largest drone war in the world".

Libya's UN-supported government launched a counterattack on Sunday against a strategic military base used by renegade commander Khalifa Haftar to pound the capital Tripoli with rocket fire. The response came after a missile barrage damaged Tripoli's main airport and set fuel tanks and several aircraft ablaze, with at least six civilians killed in surrounding residential areas in the attacks on Saturday. Meanwhile, Turkey - the Government of National Accord's (GNA) main ally defending Tripoli against Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) - threatened to step up its attacks against the eastern-based LNA, which has attempted to seize the capital for more than a year. "The forces of war criminal [Haftar] fired more than a hundred rockets and missiles at residential areas in the centre of the capital," the GNA said in a statement on Facebook. The airport was badly damaged and came under renewed rocket fire on Sunday morning, it said.

A United Arab Emirates (UAE) drone strike on a biscuit factory near the Libyan capital Tripoli on November 18 killed eight civilians and injured 27 others, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. In a report released on Wednesday, the rights group said the UAE appeared to take little or no action to minimise civilian casualties and called on Emirati authorities to conduct a transparent investigation into the incident. "Since the current armed conflict in Tripoli erupted in April 2019, the UAE has been conducting air and drone strikes to support the Libyan Arab Armed forces, previously known as the Libyan National Army [LNA], one of two major parties to the conflict, some of which have resulted in civilian casualties," HRW said. "All causalities in the November incident were civilian factory workers, including seven Libyans and 28 foreign nationals, all of them men." Human Rights Watch visited the site and found remnants of at least four Blue Arrow-7 (BA-7) laser-guided missiles that were launched by a Wing Loong-II drone.