Body
Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son and one-time heir apparent of Libya’s late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, was killed in the northern African country, Libyan officials said Tuesday. The chief prosecutor’s office said the 53-year-old was killed in the town of Zintan, about 136 kilometers (85 miles) southwest of the capital, Tripoli.
The chief prosecutor’s office said in a statement that an initial investigation found Seif al-Islam Gadhafi was shot to death, but it did not provide further details about how he was killed. The announcement was later followed by independent confirmations from figures close to him.
Khaled al-Zaidi, a lawyer for Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, confirmed his death on Facebook without providing details. Abdullah Othman Abdurrahim, who represented Gadhafi in the U.N.-brokered political dialogue intended to resolve Libya’s long-running conflict, also announced the death on Facebook.
Seif al-Islam’s political team later issued a statement saying “four masked men” stormed his house and killed him in what it described as a “cowardly and treacherous assassination.” The statement said the men closed the CCTV cameras at the house “in a desperate attempt to conceal traces of their heinous crimes,” and it added that he clashed with the assailants.
Born in June 1972 in Tripoli, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi was the second-born son of the longtime dictator. He studied for a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and had been viewed as a reformist face of the Gadhafi-era leadership.
Moammar Gadhafi was toppled in 2011 in a NATO-backed popular uprising after more than 40 years in power, and he was killed in October 2011 amid fighting that later turned into a civil war. Libya has since plunged into chaos and splintered among rival armed groups and militias.
Seif al-Islam was captured by fighters in Zintan in late 2011 as he tried to flee to neighboring Niger. The fighters released him in June 2017 after one of Libya’s rival governments granted him amnesty, and he then lived in Zintan.
A Libyan court convicted him of inciting violence and murdering protesters and sentenced him to death in absentia in 2015. He was also wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity related to the 2011 uprising.
In November 2021, Seif al-Islam announced his candidacy for Libya’s presidential election, a move that drew outcry from anti-Gadhafi political forces in both western and eastern Libya. The country’s High National Elections Committee disqualified him, and the election has not been held amid disputes between rival administrations and armed groups that have governed Libya since the fall of Moammar Gadhafi.