Hannibal Gaddafi was briefly kidnapped by armed group demanding information about missing Shia Imam.
One of the sons of Libya’s late leader Muammar Gaddafi has been kidnapped in Lebanon by militants demanding information about the fate of a Shia cleric who went missing in Libya decades ago.
Gaddafi appeared to have been beaten up and had black eyes but he was “in good health, happy and relaxed.” He was freed in the city of Baalbek and dispatched to Beirut, the capital.
Al-Sadr, one of Lebanon’s most prominent Shia Imams in the 20th century, vanished, along with two other people, during a trip to Tripoli in 1978. Lebanon blamed the disappearance on Muammar Gaddafi.
Al-Sadr was one of the pioneers of the Shia movement that has become a force across the Middle East, spurred by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Shia Iran.
Since al-Sadr’s disappearance, Libya has maintained that the cleric and his two traveling companions left Tripoli in 1978 on a flight to Rome and suggested he was a victim of a power struggle among Shias.
Hannibal, born in 1975, was among a group of family members – including Gaddafi’s wife Safiya, son Mohammed and daughter Aisha – who escaped to neighboring Algeria after the fall of Tripoli in 2011.
Hannibal Gaddafi was arrested in 2008 for allegedly beating up two servants in a Geneva luxury hotel, sparking a diplomatic spat that dragged on for months. In 2005, a French court convicted him of striking a pregnant companion in a Paris hotel. He was given a four-month suspended prison sentence and a small fine. He fled to Algeria after Tripoli fell, along with his mother and several other relatives.