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She called Human Rights Watch Lebanese authorities to “immediately” release Hannibal Gaddafi, son Former Libyan leaderHe has been detained in pretrial detention for 8 years on charges that the organization described as ridiculous and fabricated.
The organization indicated that approximately 80% of prison inmates in Lebanon are in pretrial detention, and some of them are detained for many years without charge.
Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, which oversee prison operations, arrested Hannibal Gaddafi in December 2015, allegedly in connection with the disappearance of the imam. Musa Al-Sadr And his two companions in Libya after an official visit in August 1978.
According to one of Gaddafi’s lawyers, the Lebanese authorities accused Hannibal of “withholding information and later interfering in the ongoing crime of kidnapping” of Imam al-Sadr, even though Gaddafi Jr. was only two years old in 1978 at the time, and after reaching the age of majority he did not hold any high official position, according to the organization.
Human Rights Watch said, “The supposed arbitrary detention of Hannibal Gaddafi on trumped-up charges after spending 8 years in pretrial detention raises a mockery of the already weak Lebanese judicial system.”
She added that the Lebanese authorities had long ago exhausted any justification for continuing to detain Gaddafi and should drop the charges and release him.
The organization said that in July 2023, it wrote separately to Major General Imad Othman, Director General of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, and Judge Zaher Hamada, the judicial investigator responsible for the case, requesting detailed information about Gaddafi’s judicial status and health, but it did not receive any response.
The defense team said Gaddafi went on a hunger strike from June to October to protest his continued arbitrary detention as well as detention conditions that resulted in severe weight loss and frequent hospitalizations.
Unknown assailants kidnapped Gaddafi in 2015 in Syria near the Lebanese border after he was tricked into giving an interview to a newspaper, according to reports. Instead, the militants transferred him to Lebanon, where they tortured him, demanded information about Imam al-Sadr’s disappearance and demanded a ransom, according to his lawyer. Gaddafi was living in Syria with his family after fleeing Libya at the beginning of the 2011 revolution that toppled his father’s regime, and after spending a period in Algeria and Oman.
The Lebanese authorities freed Gaddafi from his captors, but according to reports, they arrested him days later and kept him detained in the “Information Division” of the Internal Security Forces after Judge Hamadeh issued an arrest warrant accusing him of concealing information about the disappearance of Imam al-Sadr.
