Gadhafi’s son captured in Libya

Associated Press

ZINTAN, Libya

Moammar Gadhafi’s fugitive son and former heir apparent, Seif al-Islam, was captured by revolutionary fighters in the southern desert Saturday just over a month after his father was killed, setting off joyous celebrations across Libya and closing the door on the possibility that he could stoke further insurrection.

Seif 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 Seif al-Islam, who has been charged by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, had been detained about 30 miles west of the town of Obari in an area that borders Niger, Mali and Algeria.

A photograph was widely circulated showing the 39-year-old son in custody, sitting by a bed and holding up three bandaged fingers as a guard looks on, although Osama Juwaid, a spokesman for the fighters from Zintan who made the arrest, said it was an old injury caused by a NATO airstrike and the detainee 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,” Libya’s interim Prime Minister Abdurrahim el-Keib at a news conference in the mountain town of Zintan, where Seif al-Islam was taken after his capture.

ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo told The Associated Press that he will travel to Libya this week for talks with the country’s transitional government on where the trial will take place. Ocampo said that though national governments have the first right to try their own citizens for war crimes, his primary goal was to ensure Seif al-Islam has a fair trial.

“The good news is that Seif al-Islam is arrested, he is alive, and now he will face justice,” Ocampo said in an interview in The Hague. “Where and how, we will discuss it.”

Seif al-Islam’s capture leaves only former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senoussi wanted by the ICC, which indicted the two men along with Gadhafi in June for unleashing a campaign of murder and torture to suppress the uprising against the Gadhafi regime that broke out in mid-February. Protests inspired by the so-called Arab Spring sweeping the region soon escalated into a civil war, with NATO launching airstrikes under a U.N.-mandate to protect civilians.

The emergence of Seif al-Islam as the only Gadhafi in custody to face justice posed a major test of the interim government’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law.