Hannibal Gadhafi, son of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, has been released by Lebanese authorities after paying his $900,000 bail, ending his 10-year detention in Lebanon, officials confirmed on Monday.
Gadhafi had been detained since 2015 on suspicion of withholding information on the fate of Lebanese Shiite cleric Moussa al-Sadr, who disappeared during a visit to Libya in 1978.
Security sources and Gadhafi’s lawyer, Charbel Milad al-Khoury, confirmed his release, saying he was now fully entitled to choose his next destination.
The release comes after a judicial decision earlier in the week that reduced his bail from $11 million to $900,000 and lifted a travel ban, allowing him to leave the country.
It was reportedly paid by a Libyan delegation that had been negotiating for Gadhafi’s release with Lebanese authorities.
Before his kidnapping in 2015 by Lebanese militants seeking information on al-Sadr, Hannibal Gadhafi had lived in exile with his Lebanese wife, Aline Skaf, and their children in Syria.
He was then kept in a Beirut jail without trial, creating a continuing legal and diplomatic standoff between Lebanon and Libya.
The disappearance of the cleric is still a taboo topic in Lebanon. While most Lebanese believe that Moussa al-Sadr is dead, his family still insists he could be alive in a Libyan jail. Al-Sadr would now be 96 years old.
Hannibal, who was born in 1975, three years before al-Sadr disappeared, fled to Algeria, and later Syria, where he was granted political asylum, following the 2011 Libyan uprising that ultimately saw the death of Moammar Gadhafi and some of his children.
His release marks a major development in the long-running saga surrounding the Gadhafi family’s legal and diplomatic entanglements.
Moammar Gadhafi was survived by eight children, many of whom played important roles in governing the country. Several, including Muatassim, Saif al-Arab and Khamis, were killed in the 2011 uprising while others such as Saif al-Islam remain active in Libya today.
Hannibal’s siblings Mohammed and Aisha now live in Oman. Al-Saadi resides in Turkey after being released from detention in Libya in 2021.
The Lebanese Justice Ministry confirmed that Gadhafi’s defense team also withdrew a case against the Lebanese state that had been filed in Geneva last month over his prolonged detention without trial.