Chad's former dictator Hissene Habre, whose government was accused of killing tens of thousands and became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity by an African court after spending decades in luxurious exile in Senegal, has died in a hospital in Senegal. He was 79.

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Habre, whose case for years showcased Africa's reluctance to put its despots on trial, had recently contracted COVID-19 according to local media reports. His death Tuesday at a Dakar hospital was confirmed by Jean Bertrand Bocande, director of the penitentiary administration.

The former dictator had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 2016 but ultimately served about five years in prison following his trial on charges linked to his time in power from 1982 to 1990.

Human rights activists say Chad was a ruthless, one-party state under Habre's rule. A fearsome security service headed by members of Habre's Gorane ethnic group was placed in every village, documenting even the slightest transgressions against the regime, they said.

The list of offenses meriting arrest included speaking ill of Habre, listening to "enemy" radio stations or "performing magical rites to aid the enemy," according to a truth commission appointed shortly after Habre fell from power.

The commission concluded that Habre's government oversaw 40,000 killings.

"Hissene Habre will go down in history as one of the world's most pitiless dictators, a man who slaughtered his own people, burned down entire villages, sent women to serve as sexual slaves for his troops and built clandestine dungeons to inflict medieval torture on his enemies," tweeted Reed Brody, a Human Rights Watch lawyer who worked for years to bring Habre to justice.

Earlier this year he wrote that five years after Habre's conviction "torture survivors and families of the dead have not seen one penny."

"The African Union has failed even to establish the court-mandated trust fund to search for Habre's assets and solicit contributions," Brody wrote. "The Chadian government, ordered by its own court to erect memorials and compensate victims, has also turned its back on them. And Habre himself has never accounted for the tens of millions of dollars he allegedly looted from the Chadian treasury."

Detainees were subject to a wide range of torture techniques. Some were burned, others were sprayed with poison gas and still more were forced to put their mouths around the exhaust pipes of running vehicles, causing severe burning when the motor accelerated.

Habre was born the son of a farmer in the northern Chadian town of Faya-Largeau in 1942. The country was still under French colonial rule, and he worked as a civilian for the French military before being selected to study in France, where he earned a law degree.

He returned in 1971 to work for Chad's foreign affairs ministry, but he soon became involved in a peasant rebellion of Muslim northerners against the largely southern-dominated Christian government.

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His rise did not seem driven by ideology. The final report of the truth commission sharply criticized Habre's opportunism, describing him as "a man without scruples" motivated by power alone. "Thus he would join with the armed rebellion one moment and with the government the next. To win over public sympathy, he portrayed himself by turns as a convinced Maoist and a fervent Muslim," the report said.

In a later passage, the report said that despite Habre's education, his "comportment and thinking are not much different from those of a camel thief."

Habre became prime minister under then-President Felix Malloum in 1978, but Malloum fell from power the following year.

In 1982, Habre deposed President Goukouni Oueddei, beginning his eight years as head of state. Aware that his regime was under threat from Libya, Habre created his security service known as the Directorate of Documentation and Security, or DDS, not long after becoming president.

He received substantial support from the United States and France because he was seen as a "bulwark" against former Libya dictator Moammar Gadhafi, according to Human Rights Watch. Habre received hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid and was invited to the White House, HRW says, while support from France came in the form of arms and logistical support.

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Supporters of Iran's exiled opposition rallied in Berlin Saturday to demand the prosecution of the Islamic Republic's newly elected president, Ebrahim Raisi, whom they accused of crimes against humanity.

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Flag-waving demonstrators rallied at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate as part of a "Free Iran World Summit" that featured speeches by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa. In a keynote address, Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, accused Raisi of being the "henchman" responsible for the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said Raisi's election was a blow for human rights and called for an investigation of his role in what they and Washington have called the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners.

Iran has never acknowledged the mass executions, and Raisi has never publicly addressed allegations about his role.

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The request filed with the ICC alleges that European Union officials are knowingly responsible for deaths of migrants at land and sea, and their widespread rape and torture at the hands of a Libyan coast guard funded and trained at the expense of European taxpayers. It names no EU official but cites an ongoing ICC investigation into the fate of migrants in Libya.

The legal document cites public EU documents, statements from the French president, the German chancellor and other top officials from the bloc.

"We leave it to the prosecutor, if he dares, if she dares, to go into the structures of power and to investigate at the heart of Brussels, of Paris, of Berlin and Rome and to see by searching in the archives of the meetings of the negotiations who was really behind the scenes trying to push for these policies that triggered the death of more than 14,000 people," said Juan Branco, a lawyer who co-wrote the report and shared it with The Associated Press.

The ICC is a court of last resort that handles cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide when other countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute. It is up to the prosecutor, who receives many such requests, to decide whether to investigate and ultimately bring a case.

The EU spokeswoman in charge of migration, Natasha Bertaud, declined to comment directly on the court filing, but she and Germany's government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, each placed blame for deaths at sea firmly on smugglers.

"The EU's track record on saving lives in the Mediterranean speaks for itself, saving lives has been our top priority and we have been working relentlessly to this end," Bertaud said.

The first crime, according to the document, was the decision to end the Mare Nostrum rescue operation near the end of 2014. In one year, the operation rescued 150,810 migrants in the Mediterranean as hundreds of thousands crossed the sea. The operation cost more than €9 million ($10 million) a month, nearly all paid for by Italy. It was replaced by an operation named Triton, financed by all 28 EU nations at a fraction of the cost. But unlike the earlier operation, Triton ships didn't patrol directly off the Libyan coast, the origin of most of the flimsy smuggling boats that were taking off for Europe.

Deaths in the Mediterranean then soared. In 2014, around 3,200 migrants died in the sea. The following year, it rose to over 4,000, and in 2016 peaked at over 5,100 deaths and disappearances, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration.

"The objective of this new policy was to sacrifice the lives of many in order to impact the behavior of more," according to the complaint. "It also failed. Crossings did not decrease as predicted, because the risk had little deterrent effect on those who have little to lose to begin with."

Bertaud said the EU quickly realized its mistake in ending the Mare Nostrum operation and tripled its rescue capacity in 2015, helping save the lives of 730,000 since that year.

But EU countries leaned heavily on the Libyan coast guard to do so, sending money and boats and a degree of training to units of the loosely organized force linked to various factions of Libya's militias. For Alpha Kaba, a Guinean detained in slave-like conditions in Libya before ultimately making the crossing in 2016, that decision is a travesty.

Kaba was rescued by a ship operated by humanitarian organizations. Those are all but gone now from the Mediterranean, after Italy, Malta and other countries repeatedly refused to allow them to dock with migrants on board. And in the past two years, migration has considerably increased to Europe. The total for the first four months of 2019 was around 24,200 for irregular migration, 27% lower than a year ago, according to Frontex, the EU's border agency.

"Yes, there's no more migration, but where are all those young people that they picked up? They're in the prisons. They're in Libya and in prisons, and they're being tortured over there. If they aren't allowed in Europe, then let them go back to their countries quickly and under good conditions," said Kaba, who has received asylum in France. "There are no more entrances or exits."

Libya's role in the migrant crisis is already on the radar of the court's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. In a statement to the Security Council in May 2017, she said that her investigators were collecting and analyzing "information relating to serious and widespread crimes allegedly committed against migrants attempting to transit through Libya."

She told the council: "I am deeply alarmed by reports that thousands of vulnerable migrants, including women and children, are being held in detention centers across Libya in often inhumane conditions. Crimes, including killings, rapes and torture, are alleged to be commonplace."

The court also already has an investigation in Libya, ordered by the U.N. Security Council during the bloody campaign by late dictator Moammar Gadhafi against popular protests in 2011 that ultimately toppled his regime and led to his death.

The court receives many similar requests every year for formal investigations into war crimes and crimes against humanity.

"The more detailed the communication, the more likely the prosecutor will take it seriously," said Dov Jacobs, a defense lawyer at the ICC who is not connected to the 243-page request.

Branco said he believed the details in the report, co-written with Omer Shatz, would leave the court little choice.

"[European officials] pretended that this was a tragedy that nothing could be done against it that they had no role in it," he said. "And we demonstrate very carefully that, on the contrary, they triggered this so-called tragedy."

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