ZINTAN, Libya: A month after Muammar Gaddafi was captured and killed, his son Saif al-Islam was seized without a fight by Libyan militiamen who are now holding him in their mountain stronghold until Tripoli has a government to try him.
”The final of act of the Libyan drama”, as a spokesman for the former rebels put it, began in the blackness of the Sahara night, when a small unit of fighters from the town of Zintan, acting on a tip-off, intercepted Gaddafi and four armed companions driving in a pair of 4×4 vehicles on a desert track.
It ended, after a 300-mile flight north on a cargo plane, with the London-educated, 39-year-old heir-apparent to four decades of dictatorship held in a safe house in Zintan and the townsfolk vowing to see no harm to him until he can face a judge, and maybe in due course, an executioner in the capital. His captors said he was ”very scared” when first they recognised him, despite the heavy beard and enveloping Tuareg robes and turban he wore.
But they reassured him and, by the time a Reuters correspondent spoke to him aboard the plane, he had been chatting amiably off and on to his guards.
Despite a tense couple of hours on the runway, when excited crowds rushed the plane that flew him from Obari in the desert to Zintan, an anti-Gaddafi bastion in the Western Mountains, the fighters holding him said they were determined he would not meet the fate of his father, who was killed after being seized.
Western leaders, who backed February’s uprising against Gaddafi but looked on squeamishly as rebel fighters filmed themselves venting vengeance on the fallen strongman a month ago on Sunday, urged the incoming government of Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib to seek foreign help to ensure a fair trial.
Keib, who spent a career teaching engineering at US universities before returning to Libya to join the rebellion, drove up from Tripoli to Zintan to pay homage to its fighters. He promised justice would be done – though Saif al-Islam would not be handed over to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, which had indicted him for crimes against humanity.
The justice minister from the outgoing executive said the younger Gaddafi was likely to face Libya’s death penalty, though the precise charge sheet, expected to include ordering killings as well as looting the public purse, would be drawn up only by the state prosecutor after due investigation. (Reuters)