(Reuters/Web Desk) – The most prominent son of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, has been killed, sources close to the family, his lawyer Khaled al-Zaidi and Libyan media said on Tuesday.
The office of Libya's attorney general on Wednesday said investigators and forensic doctors examined the body of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi on Tuesday and determined that he died from gunshot wounds.
The office added in a statement that it was working to identify suspects and take the steps needed to bring a criminal case.
The local media quoted Saif al-Islam’s lawyer, Khaled al-Zaidi, and his political adviser, Abdulla Othman, who announced his death in separate posts on Facebook on Tuesday, without providing details.
Libyan news outlet Fawasel Media cited Othman as saying that armed men killed the 53-year-old Saif al-Islam in his home in the town of Zintan, some 136km southwest of the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
His political team later said in a statement that “four masked men” stormed his house and killed him in a “cowardly and treacherous assassination”.
The statement said that he clashed with the assailants, who closed the security cameras at the house “in a desperate attempt to conceal traces of their heinous crimes”.
Khaled al-Mishri, the former head of the Tripoli-based High State Council, an internationally recognised government body, called for an “urgent and transparent investigation” into the killing in a social media post.
Accodring to Al Jazeera, Saif al-Islam was considered to be his father Muammar’s number two from 2000 until 2011, when the senior Gaddafi was killed by Libyan opposition forces, ending his decades-long rule.
Saif al-Islam was captured and imprisoned in Zintan in 2011 after attempting to flee the North African country following the opposition’s takeover of Tripoli.
He was released in 2017 as part of a general pardon and had lived in Zintan since.
Born in June 1972 in Tripoli, he was Western-educated and fluent in English, presenting himself for years as a reformist figure within Libya’s authoritarian system. He played a central role in efforts to restore Libya’s relations with Western governments, including negotiations to abandon weapons of mass destruction and compensation talks over the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
When the rebellion broke out against his father’s long rule in 2011, Saif al-Islam immediately chose family and clan loyalties, becoming an architect of the brutal crackdown on dissidents, whom he called rats.
Speaking to the Reuters news agency at the time of the popular uprising in Libya in 2011, he said: “We fight here in Libya, we die here in Libya.”
“All of Libya will be destroyed. We will need 40 years to reach an agreement on how to run the country, because today, everyone will want to be president, or emir, and everybody will want to run the country,” he said.
He was accused of torture and extreme violence against opponents of his father’s rule, and by February 2011, he was on a United Nations sanctions list and banned from travelling. He was also wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity committed in 2011.
After the rebels took over the capital, Tripoli, he tried to flee to neighbouring Niger dressed as a Bedouin tribesman. But he was captured by the Abu Bakr Sadik Brigade militia on a desert road and flown to Zintan.
Following long negotiations with the ICC, Libyan officials were granted authority to try him for alleged war crimes. In 2015, a Tripoli court sentenced him to death in absentia.
After his release from detention in 2017, he spent years underground in Zintan to avoid assassination.
In November 2021, Saif al-Islam announced his candidacy in the country’s presidential election in a controversial move that was met with outcry from anti-Gaddafi political forces in western and eastern Libya. He was disqualified because of his 2015 conviction.