Libya Traditional Jewelery Hangs on by Silver Thread

A Libyan woman crafts a piece of traditional filigree jewelry. Mahmud Turkia AFP
A Libyan woman crafts a piece of traditional filigree jewelry. Mahmud Turkia AFP
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Libya Traditional Jewelery Hangs on by Silver Thread

A Libyan woman crafts a piece of traditional filigree jewelry. Mahmud Turkia AFP
A Libyan woman crafts a piece of traditional filigree jewelry. Mahmud Turkia AFP

n Tripoli's Old City, young Libyans weave delicate patterns with threads of silver and gold to create traditional filigree jewelry -- reviving an art almost lost through decades of dictatorship and war.

Abdelmajid Zeglam is just 12 years old, but his minutely detailed creations are already selling fast in the streets around a Roman-era archway dedicated to emperor Marcus Aurelius, AFP said.

"I hesitated at first for fear of failing because I'm young, but my mum encouraged me," Zeglam said.

He is the youngest of 20 or so students, around half of them female, studying at the Libyan Academy for Traditional Gold and Silver Crafts, in a building that once served as a French consulate to the Ottoman Empire.

Trainees learn about precious metal alloys before studying the art of filigree, in which beads and threads of the precious materials are woven into intricate designs then soldered together to create jewelry.

"I love it," Zeglam said. "I want to become a petroleum engineer in the mornings and a jeweler in the afternoons."

Mohamed al-Miloudi, a 22-year-old civil engineering student in a baseball cap, said he had not missed a class since signing up in September.

"It's a hobby, but I'd like to make it into my trade," he said.

The institute's founder, Abdelnasser Aboughress, said filigree jewelry was an ancient tradition in the North African country.

"Craftsmen in the medina of Tripoli were trained by Jewish masters and later by Arabs, at the prestigious School of Arts and Trades" founded in the late 19th century, he said.

- Secret jewelers -
But generations of tradition were abruptly halted after Moamer Kadhafi took power in a 1969 coup.

The capricious ruler scrapped the constitution and established his "jamahiriya" -- a medley of socialism, Arab nationalism and tribal patronage.

He also scrapped the private sector, seizing companies and confiscating their assets.

Overnight, self-employed artisans lost everything: their workshops, their livelihoods and their students.

"The state reduced Libyan crafts to nothing and forced a generation of young apprentices, who should have taken up the baton, to instead leave the traditional crafts and join the army" or become civil servants, said Aboughress.

The 55-year-old was born just a few streets away in the medina, and despite Kadhafi's ban, he took up the craft at the age of 15.

Along with his father, for decades he worked in secret on jewelry for trusted clients.

Now, he hopes to pass the craft on to younger generations, as well as fighting back against a tide of "lower-quality jewelry imported from Egypt and China (which) has flooded the market".

Aboughress is working on a project to document and preserve as much of this cultural heritage as possible.

- 'People with passion' -
Student Fatima Boussoua hit out at the practice of selling old Libyan silver jewelry at cheap prices to be exported then melted down.

"It's part of Libya's artisanal heritage that's disappearing!" she said.

A dentist in her 40s who also teaches at the University of Tripoli, Boussoua has been training at the center for the past year, hoping to master the craft.

"We should be training artists to preserve our heritage," she said. "All it needs is people with passion."

While becoming a true expert takes years of training, Aboughress's students are already producing works for sale online or at the center itself.

That said, he admits the project needs financial help to buy the expensive raw materials -- as well as "moral support".

He hopes that with enough resources, he will one day be able to set up a string of other workshops across Libya.

"It's time to bring this craft back to life," he said.



How Did a Jet Flip Upside Down on a Toronto Runway and Everyone Survive?

A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
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How Did a Jet Flip Upside Down on a Toronto Runway and Everyone Survive?

A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)

Investigators are probing the causes of an unusual plane crash at Canada's largest airport on Monday, when a regional jet flipped upside down upon landing during windy weather, sending 21 of the 80 people on board to hospital.

Video shows the Delta Air Lines plane belly up and missing its right wing at Toronto's Pearson Airport, and of the crash that involved no fatalities, circulated widely on social media. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said on Tuesday that parts of the plane -- a Bombardier-made CRJ900 -- separated after impact and the fuselage came to rest slightly off the right side of the runway, upside down, facing the other direction.

The TSB said it is too early to know what happened and why. Here is what we know about this accident and similar crashes.

HOW DOES A PLANE LAND UPSIDE DOWN?

US aviation safety expert Anthony Brickhouse said aircraft are normally designed to land first on the two main landing gear, and then the nose gear. While the cause of the accident is unclear, the type of impact on the runway likely damaged the landing gear, leaving the plane imbalanced.

Brickhouse said that the plane ending up pointing in the opposite direction speaks to the amount of force and speed that led it to change direction.

"With all the forces and everything going on, if that wing is not there to support the aircraft it's going to go over," Brickhouse said. "It's not something that we see regularly, but when structures start failing, they can't do their job and the aircraft is going to react to the different forces on it."

HOW DID EVERYONE SURVIVE?

Passengers say they were hanging upside down in their seats after the crash.

"All of the passengers were wearing the safety belts. This prevented more serious injuries from occurring," said Mitchell Fox, director of the Asia Pacific Center for Aviation Safety.

Airplane seats are designed to withstand the force of 16 times the normal pull of gravity, or 16Gs, in a crash, whereas wings and fuselage are designed to handle 3-5Gs.

"In an impact-survivable crash, it's more important for the seats to hold up, giving passengers the best chance of survival," said Raj Ladani, a program manager for aerospace engineering at Australia's RMIT University. Good evacuation is key to air accident survivability, as witnessed last year when all 379 people escaped a burning Japan Airlines plane after a runway collision.

"The crew did a remarkable job of evacuating all of the passengers expeditiously," Fox said of the Delta crash.

HAS THIS HAPPENED BEFORE?

While rare, there have been cases of large jets flipping over on landing, including three accidents involving McDonnell Douglas' MD-11 model.

In 2009, a FedEx freighter turned over on landing in windy conditions on the runway at Tokyo's Narita airport, killing both pilots. The left wing was broken and separated from the fuselage attaching point and the airplane caught fire.

In 1999, a China Airlines flight inverted at Hong Kong while landing during a typhoon. The plane touched down hard, flipped over and caught fire, killing three of 315 occupants.

In 1997, another FedEx freighter flipped over at Newark in the United States, with no fatalities.

Brickhouse said it is too early to draw any conclusions from these earlier cases, especially as the MD-11 is a three-engine aircraft and the CRJ900 has two engines mounted toward the back of the aircraft, producing different flight dynamics.

HOW WILL THE INVESTIGATION PROCEED?

Unlike other investigations in which parts of the plane have gone missing, and there are mass fatalities, investigators will be able to interview all 76 passengers and four crew.

Investigators have access to the fuselage and wing, which are on the runway, and the black boxes -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- have been sent for analysis.

"This is going to be a textbook investigation," Brickhouse said. "Some accidents, a lot of the pieces of the puzzle are missing. But right now looking at this accident, all the puzzle pieces are there. It's just you piecing them back together at this point."