Gadhafi son falls; Libya rejoices

NEWLY CAPTURED GADHAFI SON. In this photo released Feb. 23, 2011 by China's Xinhua News Agency, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi waits before a news conference in Tripoli, Libya. A Libyan militia commander has told reporters at a news conference Saturday Nov. 19, 2011 that Moamar Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam has been captured in southern Libya. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Hamza Turkia)

ZINTAN, Libya—Libyan militia fighters on Saturday captured Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the last fugitive son and one-time heir apparent of Moammar Gadhafi, setting off nationwide celebrations but also exposing a potential power struggle between former rebel factions over his handling.

Al-Islam’s arrest closed the door on the possibility that he could stoke further insurrection.

Al-Islam—who has undergone a transformation from a voice of reform in an eccentric and reviled regime to one of Interpol’s most-wanted—now faces the prospect of trial before an international or Libyan court to answer for the alleged crimes of his late father’s four-decade rule over the oil-rich North African nation.

Thunderous celebratory gunfire shook the Libyan capital of Tripoli and other cities after Libyan officials said Al-Islam, who has been charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity, had been detained 50 kilometers west of the town of Obari in an area that borders Niger, Mali and Algeria.

A photograph was widely circulated showing Gadhafi’s 39-year-old son in custody, sitting by a bed and holding up three bandaged fingers as a guard looks on. He was otherwise in good health.

“I am hopeful that the capture of Gadhafi’s son is the beginning of a chapter of transparency and democracy and freedom,” said Libya’s interim Prime Minister Abdurrahim el-Keib.

Fair trial

ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo told The Associated Press that while national governments had the first right to try their own citizens for war crimes, his primary goal was to ensure Al-Islam had a fair trial.

Militia leaders in Zintan, stronghold of resistance to Gadhafi’s regime, said they captured Al-Islam in the southwestern desert, along with a small entourage.

Leaders in Zintan insisted they would not hand him over until a formal national government was formed—a process that is at least a day or two away.

Such insistence on factional power is at the heart of international concerns about Libya’s future. After Gadhafi’s killing at the hands of militiamen, his son’s case will be an important test of Libya’s commitment to the rule of law.

Scenes of revelry

The capture eliminates perhaps the best hope that loyalists had of rallying a new revolution around the remnants of the Gadhafi family. It also represents a personal transformation that turned Al-Islam from the most prominent advocate of changing his father’s Libya into one of the chief architects of the regime’s deadly crackdown on dissent in its final days.

Mussa Grife, a member of Zintan’s revolutionary movement, said fighters had been following Al-Islam through the desert using local sources for intelligence about his whereabouts.

When they learned he and a small entourage would try to make a break to leave the country, they laid a trap for him along a valley road outside Awbari, an oasis town.

When Zintan fighters blocked the caravan, Al-Islam broke from his vehicle and was captured on foot. “They tried to fight,” Grife said. A few shots were fired, but there were no reports of any wounded.

Sign of contempt

As Al-Islam was driven from the Zintan airport to an undisclosed place for detention, residents who had gathered to see him threw shoes and sandals at the vehicle, a sign of extreme contempt in the Muslim world.

For years, Al-Islam cultivated an image at home and abroad as the face of change in Libya. An international playboy in his youth, he went on to earn a doctoral degree at the London School of Economics.

He wrote a thesis on the importance of democracy and civil society groups, although accusations later emerged that it had been ghostwritten by consultants working for his father’s government.

But when the revolt against Gadhafi broke out in late February, it was Al-Islam who delivered the Gadhafi government’s first public response, warning in a long and rambling speech that the government would crush the “rats” who challenged his father’s rule.

He backed his father in his brutal crackdown on rebels in the regime’s final days, warning of “rivers of blood” if demonstrators refused to accept government offers of reform.

To opponents of the Gadhafi government, the son now sounded very much like his father.

Al-Islam’s run had come to an end, at dead of night on a desert track. Reports from New York Times News Service and Reuters