Saif al-Islam Gaddafi had been considered the number two in Libya before the 2011 death of his father, Muammar Gaddafi.
Published On 3 Feb 2026
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Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the longtime former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed in Libya.
Ahmed Khalifa, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent in Libya, said on Tuesday that Gaddafi is believed to have been shot and killed in the western Libyan city of Zintan, where he was based for the past decade.
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The 53-year-old’s killing was confirmed by his political adviser, Abdullah Othman, but the attackers and circumstances of his death remain unclear.
The Libyan authorities have yet to comment publicly.
Gaddafi never had an official position in Libya, but was considered to be his father’s number two from 2000 until 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Libyan opposition forces that ended his decades-long rule.
Gaddafi was captured and imprisoned in Zintan in 2011 after attempting to flee the North African country following the opposition’s takeover of Tripoli.
He was released in 2017 as part of a general pardon.
Prominent role
A Western-educated and well-spoken man, Gaddafi presented a progressive face to the oppressive Libyan regime run by his father – and he played a prominent role in a drive to repair Libya’s relations with the West, beginning in the early 2000s.
He received a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2008, with his dissertation looking into the role of civil society in reforming global governance.
Gaddafi remained prominent throughout the violence that gripped the country in the wake of the Arab Spring.
Speaking to the Reuters news agency at the time of the popular uprising, he said: “We fight here in Libya, we die here in Libya.”
He warned that rivers of blood would flow and the government would fight to the last man and woman and bullet.
“All of Libya will be destroyed. We will need 40 years to reach an agreement on how to run the country, because today, everyone will want to be president, or emir, and everybody will want to run the country,” he said.
Gaddafi faced numerous allegations of torture and extreme violence against opponents of his father’s rule, however, and by February 2011, he was on a United Nations sanctions list and was banned from travelling.
He spent years underground in Zintan to avoid assassination after his 2017 release.
From 2016, he was allowed to contact people inside and outside Libya, said Mustafa Fetouri, a Libyan analyst with contacts in Gaddafi’s inner circle.
