Hannibal Gaddafi is Hospitalized in Beirut Following a twenty-day Hunger Strike

The health conditions of Hannibal Gaddafi, the fourth child of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, detained in Lebanon, are getting worse.

 

The new pool of lawyers set up by Tripoli’s Government of National Unity (GUN) has openly accused the Beirut authorities of being responsible for this situation.

 

Detained for years in Lebanon, Hannibal Gaddafi was transferred to a hospital in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, to receive medical treatment following his hunger strike that began on June 3 and after abstaining from taking some medicines.

 

According to the television station “Al Hadath”, part of the Saudi-owned pan-Arab network “Al Arabiya”, the conditions of Hannibal Gaddafi have “severely worsened in the last two days, due to health problems due to the ill-treatment suffered and the inhumane conditions of detention”. So far there has been no official comment from the Lebanese side.

Hannibal Gaddafi, 47, has been detained in Lebanon since 2015. After his father’s death in 2011, he took refuge in Syria where he was kidnapped by unknown persons who wanted to know about the fate of Imam Musa al Sadr, the Iranian Shiite leader Lebanese disappeared in 1978 in Libya.

 

Hannibal was later released by the Lebanese security forces before being placed in a prison. In August 2017, the speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal Shiite movement, founded by Musa al Sadr, had assured in a commemorative speech that the imam would still be alive.

 

For his part, Hannibal Gaddafi has always declared himself innocent, emphasizing that the disappearance of Al Sadr took place when he was still a child and that only his older brother, Saif al Islam Gaddafi, and the former Libyan prime minister, Abdessalam Jelloud, are aware of the dossier, as well as the cousin of the late Libyan colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Ahmed Gaddaf al Dam, who lives in Cairo, and Musa Kusa, former Foreign Minister of the Gaddafi government.

The accusations by Hannibal Gaddafi’s lawyers risk creating a diplomatic case between Libya and Lebanon. The latter country, moreover, is going through a serious economic and institutional crisis.

 

Suffice it to say that on March 30, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry had proposed the closure of diplomatic offices around the world, including those in Libya.

 

The decision of the ministry, which had already presented a proposal for cuts to the Council of Ministers in March 2022, was due to the scarcity of economic resources at its disposal.

 

Meanwhile, a Libyan source explained to “Agenzia Nova” that the Greens (ie the former Gaddafis) “are now part of the disputes for the formation of a new unitary government and increasingly present in the country’s deepest forces”.

 

Not only. On June 9, the Presidential Council of Libya, a tripartite institution holding the function of “head of state” (and therefore also of supreme head of the Armed Forces), announced the formation of an “ad hoc” committee to follow up the Hannibal case Gaddafi and to provide “adequate humanitarian and sanitary conditions, as well as to guarantee a fair trial”.

 

It is no coincidence, therefore, that the National Committee for Human Rights in Libya last June 15 expressed its firm condemnation of “the arbitrary detention of the Libyan citizen Hannibal Muammar Gaddafi, the ill-treatment and degradation of his dignity and inhuman treatment , and the lack of a fair trial and the right to communicate with his lawyer and family, for 8 years in a Lebanese prison in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, following allegations against him of acts he did not commit.”

 

Muammar Gaddafi’s son has started a hunger strike in protest against his eight-year detention in Lebanon, a detention he himself defines as “political” and which has taken place without trial for all these years.

 

The Presidential Council had stated in a statement that the committee, chaired by the Minister of Justice in the government of national unity (GUN), has the purpose of defending Hannibal Gaddafi before all the Lebanese authorities and courts.