SAADI GADDAFI IN LIBYAN PRISON
Dictator’s playboy son extradited from Niger.
In the photos taken after he returned to Tripoli on Thursday, Saadi Gaddafi was shown kneeling in an indigo jumpsuit, fists clenched as his head and beard were shaved off with an electric razor.
It was a far cry from the princely Gaddafi who once made regular visits to Toronto, where he owned a penthouse, hosted lavish parties and peddled access to the oil-rich dictatorship ruled by his father.
But the champagne life appears to be over for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s “playboy” son: Two and a half years after he fled Libya as his father’s regime was collapsing, he has returned from exile as a fugitive.
“Saadi Muammar Gaddafi was extradited to Libya from Niger this morning, March 6, and is currently detained by Libya’s Judicial Police,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.
“The Libyan government is keen that the suspect, Saadi Gaddafi, will receive a just and a fair treatment that will reflect international standards,” it said, thanking Nigeriens “for their co-operation which led to the handover.”
In Tripoli, celebratory gunshots were fired into the air to mark the latest arrest of a Gaddafi. The Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade, a now-disbanded militia that fought the former regime, posted five photos on its Facebook page showing a downcast Mr. Gaddafi being shaved by unseen men.
“Al-Saadi Gaddafi in the hands of justice,” read the post. “Al-Saadi receiving a routine inmate head shave before facing trial.” It said that upon returning from Niger, he had been “received by former TRB warriors. He will be standing trial soon.”
Human Rights Watch said Mr. Gaddafi was being held at the alHadhba Prison in Tripoli, along with other former Gaddafi government officials, who have complained about their treatment.
“Libya has the responsibility to see that Saadi Gaddafi gets his full due process rights. They should protect him from torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; allow him visits from legal counsel, his family, and medical personnel; and bring him promptly before a judge,” the rights group said.
A spokesman for Libya’s attorneygeneral said Mr. Gaddafi faced charges related to the fight to keep his father in power as well as the 2005 murder of the coach of Tripoli’s Al Ittihad soccer team, the AFP reported.
An Interpol alert said he was also wanted “for allegedly misappropriating properties through force and armed intimidation when he headed the Libyan Football Federation.” The United Nations Security Council has frozen his accounts and banned him from travel.
Unlike his older brother Saif, Mr. Gaddafi was never keen to succeed his father. Instead, he made a failed attempt at a career as a professional soccer player in Italy and studied engineering, all the while relishing the opulent lifestyle bankrolled by the dictatorship and its business associates.
Although he was a general in the Libyan special forces, Mr. Gaddafi’s only real official responsibility was to help co-ordinate development projects — which left him ideally placed to cash in on his role as a middle man.
The RCMP declined to comment Thursday on Mr. Gaddafi’s arrest. But according to RCMP documents filed in court, Montreal-based SNCLavalin Group Inc. paid Mr. Gaddafi $160-million in bribes in exchange for major construction contracts in Libya.
The money was allegedly funnelled to offshore companies controlled by Riadh Ben Aissa, who was then SNC-Lavalin’s vice-president, and from there transferred to accounts controlled by Mr. Gaddafi.
“It is alleged that these sums of money were paid as compensation for having influenced the granting of major contracts to SNC-Lavalin,” Corporal Brenda Makad, a member of the RCMP’s anti-corruption squad, wrote in a sworn statement.
The kickbacks served partly “to buy yachts for the benefit of Saadi Gaddafi,” the corporal wrote. SNCLavalin also spent $200,000 redecorating Mr. Gaddafi’s $1.6-million Toronto penthouse, she said, describing how Mr. Ben Aissa and Mr. Gaddafi had “maintained an amicable and mutually beneficial relationship.”
That relationship was so valuable that when the Gaddafi regime began to teeter, Mr. Ben Aissa and his associate Stéphane Roy allegedly used company money to finance a mission to fly the dictator’s son and his family to Mexico.
An Ontario-based private security contractor, Gary Peters, said he was hired to make the arrangements but the plan flopped and Mr. Gaddafi ended up having to escape Tripoli in an armed convoy that brought him to Niger.
While Libya had demanded that Niger return Mr. Gaddafi, he feared for his life after his father was captured and killed in October 2011. Niger let him and his entourage stay under what was described as house arrest, but the government appears to have become uneasy over its high-profile guest and his entourage.
“They were enjoined to stay quiet and do nothing to destabilize Libya,” said Justice Minister Marou Amadou,
The New York Times reported. “And unfortunately, the Libyans gave us lots of information that they were not staying quiet.”
He did not elaborate but Mr. Gaddafi was accused of having contacts with Libyan militias loyal to his father, and plotting from exile to overthrow the new government. “We couldn’t keep harbouring people who were taking actions that destabilized Libya,” Mr. Amadou said.
The Libya Mr. Gaddafi returned to is very unlike the one he left. His father’s name is now mocked rather than feared, and the apparatus that had protected and enriched the family has been dismantled.
Mr. Ben Aissa and Mr. Roy were forced out of SNC-Lavalin and now face criminal charges. Mr. Ben Aissa claimed in a recent court filing that wooing Mr. Gaddafi was just part of his job. He said SNC-Lavalin had spent $2-million entertaining Mr. Gaddafi when he visited Canada in 2008, and the following year spent $550,000 to host a party for him at the Toronto International Film Festival featuring the rapper 50 Cent.
SNC-Lavalin declined to comment.