A Libyan national who says he escaped summary execution by the Russian Wagner Group has filed a lawsuit in a court in Washington on Tuesday naming the group's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin as defendant.

The suit alleges that Wagner fighters stationed in Libya murdered three members of a local family in 2019 after detaining them without explanation. The plaintiff in the case, Libyan national Mohammed Aboujaylah Ali Anbees, survived.

According to an English-language account shared with the court, the details of which have not been verified independently, Anbees said he is alive because he played dead after two Russian mercenaries killed his father, brother and brother-in-law, in what appeared to be haphazard, drunken fire with AK-47 rifles.

"Anbees laid on the ground in the pools of blood of his family members" until the Wagner soldiers drove away, leaving him and another wounded family member for dead, the account states.

The civil case, enabled by a federal law that targets gross violations of human rights by individuals, is an attempt to seek accountability from Prigozhin, whose failed mutiny in Russia last month threw the country into turmoil before ending with his exile to Belarus.

The lawsuit also names Khalifa Haftar, who brought the group to Libya in 2018.

The law does not require the parties in the case to be U.S. citizens.

According to the account provided to the court, on the afternoon of Sept. 23, 2019, Anbees and several male family members were driving near their home in Espiaa, a village near Tripoli, when they were stopped by armed men, who later followed them to their home and detained them.

The armed men took them in a refrigerated truck commandeered from a juice factory, driving for hours away from the family home. The soldiers, who were drinking alcohol, did not respond to questions in Arabic, although one soldier demanded to know in broken English if the Libyan family had links to the extremist group known as the Islamic State.

The account says that the men could be identified as Wagner mercenaries, as they had "blue eyes," clear military training and drove a "unique model of vehicle." After the shootings occurred and the apparent Wagner mercenaries left, Anbees aided one of his brothers who survived, despite being shot in the leg, in escaping. Anbees remains in Libya.

Human rights advocates hope the suit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, could be the beginning of broader efforts to probe the mercenary network's lucrative involvement in conflicts. Wagner's actions in Libya took place years before Russia's invasion of Ukraine led Prigozhin to publicly acknowledge his ties to the group.

Kip Hale, a lawyer specializing in atrocity crimes accountability and who served as investigation team leader of the United Nations' Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya, said airing the allegations in a court would allow facts to be vetted and established. It could serve as a catalyst for later accountability, he said.

"That's not to say that Wagner's leaders and all of their fighters are going to be dragged into court," Hale said. "But it puts pressure on them, which is very important when dealing with Russians" who are well-known for trafficking in disinformation.

The group that is helping the plaintiff bring its case against Prigozhin, the Libyan American Alliance, has brought several lawsuits against Haftar for his alleged involvement in torture and extrajudicial killings.

The cases were brought under the Torture Victim Protection Act, a 1991 law that requires a plaintiff to show that the person has exhausted local legal remedies.

"No member of the Wagner Group in Libya should feel safe or exempt from facing justice," said Omar Tabuni, the advocacy director for the Libyan American Alliance. "The Libyan families who have endured and continue to suffer from these crimes deserve their day in court."

Cases were previously filed against Haftar in the Eastern District of Virginia, in the state where the Libyan lived for years and where he had substantial property holdings. One of the cases is pending, with Haftar last year invoking state secrets to refuse to answer some questions during a deposition and his attorneys calling the case an attempt to cull "political fodder."

Before filing Tuesday's lawsuit, Anbees had given an account of the deaths of his family members to Arabic-language media outlets. He also spoke on the condition of anonymity to a U.N.-backed fact-finding mission team that visited Libya this year and published a report finding "reasonable grounds" to believe that Wagner fighters involved in the case "committed war crimes of murder, torture and cruel treatment."