Despite holding no official position, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was once seen as the most powerful figure in the oil-rich North African country after his autocrat father Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled for more than four decades.
Saif Gaddafi the most prominent son of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, has been killed in an attack carried out by four assailants, according to Saudi-owned publication Al Arabiya. The 53-year-old was killed in the town of Zintan, 136 kilometres (85 miles) southwest of the capital, Tripoli.
Attackers shot Saif al-Islam in the garden of his residence before fleeing the scene on Tuesday evening, a source close to the Gaddafi family told the publication. Reports claimed gunmen disabled security cameras at Gaddafi’s house and shot him after a confrontation. He was killed at around 2:30 am (local time).
Details about the circumstances of the incident that claimed his life have not been fully disclosed, but one of Saif al-Gaddafi’s close associates described it as an “assassination.”
Abdullah Othman, who was a member of the political team (2020-2021) and one of Saif Gaddafi’s political advisers, confirmed his death in a Facebook post. “We belong to God, and to Him we return. The mujahid Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is in God’s care,” he wrote.
Saif al-Islam has remained a prominent political figure since the collapse of his father’s rule in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
The Life and Times of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi went from his notorious father’s heir apparent to a decade of captivity and obscurity in a remote hill town before launching a presidential bid in Libya that helped derail an attempted election. Despite holding no official position, he was once seen as the most powerful figure in the oil-rich North African country after his autocrat father, Moammar Gaddafi, who ruled for more than four decades.
Saif al-Islam shaped policy and mediated high-profile, sensitive diplomatic missions. He led talks on Libya abandoning its weapons of mass destruction and negotiated compensation for the families of those killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Determined to rid Libya of its pariah status, Saif al-Islam engaged with the West and championed himself as a reformer, calling for a constitution and respect for human rights. Educated at the London School of Economics and a fluent English speaker, he was once seen by many governments as the acceptable, Western-friendly face of Libya.
But when a rebellion broke out against Gaddafi’s long rule in 2011, Saif al-Islam immediately chose family and clan loyalties over his many friendships to become an architect of a brutal crackdown on rebels, whom he called rats.
Speaking to news agency Reuters at the time of the revolt, he said, “We fight here in Libya, we die here in Libya.”
After rebels took over the capital, Tripoli, Saif al-Islam tried to flee to neighbouring Niger dressed as a Bedouin tribesman. The Abu Bakr Sadik Brigade militia captured him on a desert road and flew him to the western town of Zintan about one month after his father was hunted down and summarily shot dead by rebels.
He spent the next six years detained in Zintan, a far cry from the charmed life he lived under Gaddafi when he had pet tigers, hunted with falcons and mingled with British high society on trips to London.
Human Rights Watch met him in Zintan. At the time, Saif al-Islam was missing a tooth and said he had been isolated from the world and that he did not receive visitors.
In 2015, Saif al-Islam was sentenced to death by firing squad by a court in Tripoli for war crimes.
He spent years underground in Zintan to avoid assassination after he was released by the militia in 2017 under an amnesty law. In 2021, wearing a traditional Libyan robe and turban, he appeared in the southern city of Sabha in 2021 to file his candidacy for the presidential elections.
He had been expected to play on nostalgia for the relative stability before the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled his father and ushered in years of chaos and violence. However, his candidacy was controversial and opposed by many of those who had suffered at the hands of his father’s rule. Powerful armed groups that emerged from the rebel factions that rose in 2011 rejected it outright.
As the election process ground on in late 2021 with no real agreement on the rules, Saif al-Islam’s candidacy became one of the main points of contention. He was disqualified because of his 2015 conviction, but when he tried to appeal the ruling, fighters blocked off the court. The ensuing arguments contributed to the collapse of the election process and Libya’s return to political stalemate.
