TRIPOLI (Reuters) -Hannibal Gaddafi, youngest son of Libya’s late leader Muammar Gaddafi, was released on Monday after almost a decade of detention without trial in Lebanon over the disappearance of a Shi’ite Muslim cleric, Lebanon’s National News Agency said.
Gaddafi was abducted in 2015 by militants in Syria, where he was living in exile with his Lebanese wife and children after his father was killed in the uprising that erupted in Libya in 2011.
Lebanese authorities took custody of him that same year and accused him of concealing information about the fate of Imam Musa al-Sadr, a Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim cleric who disappeared with his companions while on a trip to Libya in 1978.
Hannibal was only two years old when Sadr disappeared and had held no senior official position in Libya as an adult.
Human rights organisations decried the circumstances around his detention, calling the charges “spurious.” In 2023, Gaddafi went on hunger strike to protest his incarceration and his health subsequently deteriorated, requiring hospitalisation.
Last month Lebanon’s judiciary ordered that he be freed and set bail at $11 million. His lawyers objected and the court reduced the bail to roughly $900,000, a Lebanese judicial source said. The updated decision also lifted a travel ban on Gaddafi.
“Gaddafi’s release came after his defence lawyers paid the bail,” the National News Agency reported.
The Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU) of Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah expressed its appreciation to the Lebanese president and parliament speaker for their “collaboration that has led to the release of Gaddafi”.
The mysterious disappearance of the Muslim cleric Sadr nearly half a century ago sparked decades of accusations between Libya and Lebanon.
In its statement, GNU welcomed “the sincere intentions expressed by the Lebanese leadership to reactivate diplomatic relations between the two countries and to develop cooperation in the political, economic, and security fields”.
(Reporting by Ahmed Elumami and Laila BassamEditing by Gareth Jones)
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