Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was considered Libya’s number two leader until the death of his father, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed in Libya.
Ahmed Khalifa, Al Jazeera’s Arabia correspondent in North Africa, said on Tuesday that Gaddafi was believed to have been shot dead in the western Libyan city of Zintan, where he had been based for the past decade.
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The 53-year-old’s murder was confirmed by his political advisor Abdullah Osman, but the exact circumstances of his death remain unclear.
Khaled Al-Shuri, former head of the Superior Council of States, an internationally recognized government body based in Tripoli, called for an “urgent and transparent investigation” into the killing in a social media post on Tuesday.
Gaddafi never held an official position in Libya, but was considered his father’s number two from 2000 until 2011, when Libyan rebels killed Muammar Gaddafi, ending his decades-long rule.
Gaddafi was captured and imprisoned in Zintan in 2011 after attempting to flee the North African country following the rebel takeover of Tripoli.
He was released in 2017 as part of a general amnesty.
prominent role
Western-educated and well-spoken, Gaddafi put a progressive face on his father’s repressive Libyan regime and played a leading role in the movement to mend relations between Libya and the West starting in the early 2000s.
He received his PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2008 for a thesis examining the role of civil society in reforming global governance.
Gaddafi continued to make his presence known amid the violence that gripped the country after the Arab Spring.
“We will fight here in Libya and we will die here in Libya,” he told Reuters during the 2011 uprising in Libya.
He warned that rivers of blood would flow and the government would fight to the last man and woman to the bullet.
“All of Libya will be destroyed. It will take 40 years to come to an agreement on how to run the country, because today everyone wants to be president and emir, everyone wants to run the country,” he said.
Gaddafi faced numerous allegations of torture and extreme violence against those who opposed his father’s rule, and by February 2011 he was on the UN sanctions list and banned from traveling.
He was also wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity committed in Libya in 2011.
After lengthy negotiations with the ICC, Libyan officials were given the authority to try Gaddafi on war crimes charges. In 2015, a Tripoli court sentenced him to death in absentia.
After being released from detention in 2017, he spent years underground in Zintan to avoid assassination.
Mustafa Fetouri, a Libyan analyst with ties to Gaddafi’s inner circle, said that starting in 2016, he was allowed to have contact with people inside and outside Libya.
