Tripoli (Somalia Today) – Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of longtime former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and once the heir apparent to the regime, has been killed in western Libya, reports said Tuesday.
Ahmed Khalifa, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent in the North African country, reported that gunfire likely killed Gaddafi in Zintan, a mountain city southwest of Tripoli where he lived for the past decade.
His political adviser, Abdullah Othman, confirmed the 53-year-old’s death, though the exact circumstances remain unclear.
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” in a social media post on Tuesday, warning of potential repercussions in the fractured nation.
Heir, prisoner, and ghost
For years, Saif al-Islam survived as the enigmatic remnant of the dynasty that ruled Libya for 42 years. While never holding an official position, he operated as his father’s de facto prime minister and number two from 2000 until the 2011 NATO-backed uprising.
A fluent English speaker with a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE), Western governments long viewed him as the “reformist” face of the regime.
In the early 2000s, he spearheaded Libya’s rapprochement with the West, negotiating the compensation deal for the Lockerbie bombing and overseeing the dismantling of his father’s weapons of mass destruction programme.
However, that image shattered during the 2011 Arab Spring. As protests erupted in early 2011, Saif al-Islam appeared on state television in February to deliver a defiant, finger-wagging speech.
“We fight here in Libya, we die here in Libya,” he told the Reuters news agency at the height of the violence. He warned that “rivers of blood” would flow and the regime would fight to the “last man, last woman, and last bullet.”
A decade in Zintan
Following the fall of Tripoli and his father’s brutal death in Sirte in October 2011, Saif al-Islam fled south. In November 2011, the Abubaker al-Siddiq Battalion, a Zintan-based militia, captured him as he attempted to cross the desert into Niger disguised as a Bedouin.
At the time of his capture, he lacked several fingers on his right hand—injuries he blamed on a NATO airstrike, though rumors suggested his captors inflicted them.
Despite a Tripoli court sentencing him to death by firing squad in absentia in 2015, his Zintani captors refused to hand him over to authorities in the capital.
Instead, he remained in legal and political limbo in the mountain city, which operated largely outside Tripoli’s control.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague also sought him for alleged crimes against humanity committed during the suppression of the 2011 uprising. The warrant for his arrest remained active until his death.
In 2017, the militia announced his release under a controversial general amnesty law passed by the eastern-based parliament. He largely vanished from public view, spending years underground in Zintan to evade assassination attempts.
Failed comeback
Saif al-Islam re-emerged dramatically in November 2021, registering as a candidate for Libya’s presidential election.
Wearing a traditional brown robe and turban reminiscent of his late father, he signed his candidacy papers in the southern city of Sebha, sparking celebrations among Gaddafi loyalists and outrage among the revolution’s supporters.
“The situation is not right,” he told the New York Times in a rare interview months prior, describing Libyan politics as a dead end.
Legal challenges and the indefinite postponement of the vote ultimately stifled his candidacy, but he remained a potent symbol for the “Greens”—supporters of the old regime who felt marginalised in the post-2011 chaos.
Since 2016, his jailers have allowed him to contact people inside and outside Libya, according to Mustafa Fetouri, a Libyan analyst with contacts in Gaddafi’s inner circle, enabling him to position himself as a political player despite his isolation.
His death in Zintan, the city that served first as his prison and then his fortress, marks the definitive end of the Gaddafi family’s direct attempts to reclaim power in Libya.
