Saadi Gaddafi extradited to Libya

A second son of the late Col Muammar Gaddafi is in Libyan custody after Saadi, best-known abroad for his love of football, was extradited from Niger in the early hours of Thursday morning.

He arrived at 2.50am at the Mitiga air base in the west of the capital, Tripoli, and was transferred to Hadba prison, where he will be held pending trial alongside other regime loyalists including Abdullah al-Senussi, his father’s brother-in-law, right-hand man and security chief.

Photographs of him in a blue prison uniform and being shaved of the beard he grew apparently to signify a new sense of religion were posted by his guards on the internet.

“Saadi Muammar Gaddafi was extradited to Libya from Niger this morning and is currently being detained by Libya’s Judicial Police,” a government statement said.

Saadi Gaddafi had been granted asylum by Niger after fleeing across the Sahara desert as his father’s regime collapsed in August 2011.

But the Niger authorities accused him of breaching the terms of their agreement to guarantee his safety after he failed to stay at the house handed over to him. He was also accused of involvement in an attack believed to be by Gaddafi regime loyalists on an airport in the south of Libya near Sabha.

Saadi, 40, joins his older brother Saif al-Islam in Libyan custody.

However, there is a significant difference in the circumstances under which they are detained.

Saif al-Islam is being held in the town of Zintan to the south-west of Tripoli where the local militia, which captured him escaping across the desert in November 2011, are refusing to give him up to the central government. He is also wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which has expressed doubts as to whether he can obtain a fair trial in Libya.

Unlike Saif al-Islam, who studied at the London School of Economics and argued publicly for political reform in the country, Saadi Gaddafi was seen as a playboy more interested in the high life, girls and his passion for football.

As with much of the Gaddafi family’s antics, this was portrayed overseas in comic terms which cut little ice back home. After a Libyan investment company he controlled bought shares in Juventus, he managed to obtain a deal to play Serie A football in the country, for Perugia, before being suspended for failing a drugs test.

He was once described as the worst player ever to play top flight football in Italy.

However, in Tripoli, he forced his way into ownership of Libya’s top club, Al-Ahly, appointing himself to the team. After Tripoli fell to the rebels, former players and supporters told The Daily Telegraph of a serious of bizarre and violent incidents over which he presided.

Most notably, he was present when soldiers fired on an over-enthusiastic crowd at the Libyan or “Liberator’s” Cup Final in 1996 and killed 20 fans. “I lay on the pitch as the bullets went overhead,” said Musbah Shengab, the Al-Ahly goalkeeper at the time.

Among the alleged offences for which Saadi is being investigated by the authorities is involvement in the murder of Bashir al-Riani, Libya’s star striker in the late seventies and eighties and later a television pundit, whom Saadi befriended but who disappeared in 2005.

His family told The Telegraph that they found his body in a morgue.

Their subsequent inquiries suggested he had been stabbed to death at Saadi’s beachfront villa after criticising the regime, probably by Saadi’s cousin, Mohammed al-Senussi, Abdullah’s son.

Mohammed al-Senussi was killed by an air-strike alongside another of Col Gaddafi’s sons, Khamis, as they tried to escape the fall of Tripoli. Two other Gaddafi sons died in the war, Mutassim and Saif al-Arab, while two more, Mohammed and Hannibal, and his daughter, Aisha, are in exile with his wife, Safiya, in Oman.

An Interpol red notice says that Saadi is formally sought for "allegedly misappropriating properties through force and armed intimidation when he headed the Libyan Football Federation". He is also accused by the authorities of urging his father’s forces to repress protesters in the early stages of the Libyan uprising.