Gaddafi’s son killed

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libya’s former leader, Muammar Gaddafi, has been assassinated.

BBC reports that the 53-year-old Gaddafi junior’s lawyer told AFP that his client was killed by a “four-man commando” unit at his home in the city of Zintan.

However, the identities of the assailants have not been confirmed.

In contrast, his sister reportedly told Libyan TV that he had died near the country’s border with Algeria.

After his father, who was equally assassinated, Saif al-Islam was regarded as the most influential and feared figure in Libya.

His father ruled Libya from 1969 until he was ousted and killed during an uprising in 2011.

Saif al-Islam was believed to have played a major role in Libya’s rapprochement with the West from 2000 until his father’s regime tanked.

After the overthrow of his father, Saif al-Islam—accused of playing a central role in the violent crackdown on anti-government protests—was detained by a rival militia in the city of Zintan, where he remained imprisoned for nearly six years.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) sought to prosecute him for crimes against humanity over his alleged involvement in the violent suppression of opposition protests in 2011.

In 2015, a court in Tripoli—then under the authority of the UN-backed government in western Libya—sentenced him to death in absentia for his role in the crackdown.

Two years later, he was freed by a militia in Tobruk, in the east of the country, under an amnesty law.

Since Mr Gaddafi’s overthrow, Libya has fractured into territories controlled by rival militias and remains divided between two competing governments.

During his father’s rule, Saif al-Islam exerted significant influence over state policy and led high-profile international negotiations despite holding no formal government position, including talks that culminated in Libya abandoning its nuclear weapons programme.

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Those agreements led to the lifting of international sanctions on the North African state, and many observers at the time viewed him as a reformist and the acceptable face of a changing Libya.

However, he consistently denied any ambition to succeed his father, once saying power was “not a farm to inherit.”

He later announced in 2021 that he would run for the presidency in elections that were later postponed indefinitely.