By Barth Ikiebe with report from Aljezerra
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Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the most prominent son of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed in Libya.
Local media reported that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s lawyer, Khaled al-Zaidi, and his political adviser, Abdulla Othman, announced the 53-year-old’s death in separate posts on Facebook on Tuesday.
Libyan news outlet Fawasel Media cited Othman as saying that armed men killed Gaddafi in his home in the town of Zintan, some 136km (85 miles) southwest of the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
Gaddafi’s political team later released a statement, saying that “four masked men” stormed his house and killed him in a “cowardly and treacherous assassination”.
The statement said that he clashed with the assailants, who closed the security cameras at the house “in a desperate attempt to conceal traces of their heinous crimes”.
Khaled al-Mishri, the former head of the Tripoli-based High State Council, an internationally recognised government body, called for an “urgent and transparent investigation” into the killing in a social media post.
Gaddafi never had an official position in Libya, but was considered to be his father’s number two from 2000 until 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Libyan opposition forces, ending his decades-long rule.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was captured and imprisoned in Zintan in 2011 after attempting to flee the North African country following the opposition’s takeover of Tripoli.
He was released in 2017 as part of a general pardon and had lived in Zintan since.
