Dictator’s second son, a key figure in post-2011 Libyan politics, reportedly shot dead at home by masked assailants
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and for years the second most powerful person in the country, has been killed in a village south-west of Tripoli, officials said on Tuesday night.
The 53-year-old died from gunshot wounds in the town of Zintan, 85 miles south-west of the capital, according to the Libyan attorney general’s office. Gaddafi’s own office said he was killed in his home by masked assailants.
Once seen as a pro-western reformer who might usher Libya towards constitutional change, Gaddafi quickly backed his father’s violent crackdown on nationwide popular protests in 2011. The international criminal court in the same year issued a warrant against him for crimes against humanity over the repression, an accusation echoed by a Tripoli court in 2015.
The Libyan chief prosecutor’s office said it was looking for suspects and had dispatched forensic experts to the village, but did not provide further details of the killing.
