Hannibal Gaddafi, the youngest son of Lebanon’s former leader, was released on Monday (10.11.2025) after 10 years of detention without trial in Lebanon. Libya, Muammar Gaddafi.
The youngest son of the slain Libyan leader, Muammar GaddafiHannibal Gaddafi has been held since 2015 in Lebanon about the disappearance of Lebanese Shiite cleric Musa al-Sadr 47 years agoas reported by Lebanon’s national news agency (NNA in English, ANI in French).
Muammar Gaddafi was killed during the 2011 uprising in Libya, along with three of his sons.
In 2015, Hannibal Gaddafi was kidnapped by gunmen in Syria, where he had settled with his Lebanese wife and children. He was taken to Lebanon, where the authorities released him from the hands of his captors and detained him without ever trying him. He was accused of withholding information about the mysterious disappearance of Imam Musa al-Sadr in Libya in 1978.
Hannibal was just two years old when Sadr disappeared and had never held an official position in Libya.
In 2023, Hannibal Gaddafi went on hunger strike
Organizations for the defense of human rights had denounced the conditions of his detention, calling the accusations against him false. TIn 2023, Hannibal Gaddafi went on a hunger strike to protest his continued detention, causing his health to deteriorate and require hospitalization.
Last month, Lebanese judicial authorities ordered his release from prison on the condition that he post $11 million in bail. His lawyers filed an objection to the bail amount, which was eventually reduced to $900,000, according to a court source.
“Gaddafi released after his lawyers posted bail”reports Lebanon’s national news agency. The judicial authorities also lifted the ban on leaving the country that had been imposed on him Hannibal Gaddafi.
The Tripoli-based government of national unity of Abdelhamid al-Dbeiba thanked Beirut for freeing 50-year-old Gaddafi. At the same time, he welcomed “the sincere intentions expressed by the leadership of Lebanon to restore diplomatic relations” between the two states and “the development of cooperation at the political and economic level, as well as in security matters.”