Muammar Gaddafi’s son determined to make a political return backed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Libya
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who has died aged 53, shot dead by four masked assailants at his home, was for many years considered the heir apparent to his father Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s long-time dictator, and was still a potential force in his country’s fractured and violent politics.
He was issued with an arrest warrant by the international criminal court in 2011 – and convicted in absentia by a Libyan court in 2015 – over war crimes committed during the 2011 revolution. Saif had promised that the regime would keep fighting the rebels “until the last man standing, even the last woman standing”.
Since being captured while attempting to flee Libya after his father’s death later that year, he had largely remained, initially as a prisoner, in the western Libyan city of Zintan, where the assassins killed him.
In 2021 he had announced, with the backing of the Gaddafist or “green” Popular Front for the Liberation of Libya, his candidacy in presidential elections, which his rivals feared he might win, but which did not in the end take place.
