UPDATE: The reports about the death of Saif el
Arab Ghaddafi have confused me. Ghaddafi has had TWO osnse named Saif … one Saif el Arab and on Said el Islam.
The dead son, apparently, is the Saif ((sword) of the Arabs, el Saif el Arab. This son has led the exemplary life of a playboy, wasting Libya’s petrodollars on women and cars. In 2008 Saif al-Arab was suspected of attempting to smuggle an assault rifle; the alleged weapons were never found and the German public prosecutor decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution.[9]
During the Libyan civil war, Saif al-Arab was sent by his father to the eastern part of Libya to put down the protests. Combat troops and military equipment were placed at his disposal. It was rumored that he later defected to the rebel side along with the troops under his command. Perhaps because of this, there have been questions about who killed Saif el Arab or whether he is even really dead.
In contrast, Saif el Islam has been the visible image of Ghaddafi’ outside of Libya and the man proposed as an heir by the Libyan madman. The regime proposed that Saif, with a PhD from the London School of Economics, would succeed his father and lead a transition from Jamahiriya to a constitutional democracy.
Later Saif introduced the Isratine proposal to permanently resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a secular, federalist, republican one-state solution.[11] The first ever opinion poll survey to be undertaken in both Pakistani and Indian-controlled Kashmir, conducted by King’s College, London, and the polling organisation IPSOS-MORI, was also Saif’s brainchild,[12] having arisen out of discussions he had with British academic Robert Bradnock, the author of the 2010 Chatham House report on the survey.[13]
While fighting against responsibility for Libya’s responsibility for the PanAm bombing, Saif negotiated compensation from Italy, for colonial era abuses. He also attempted to n conclude a comprehensive agreement with the US blocking any further Libyan payments for the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing, the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the 1989 UTA Flight 772 bombing in trade for U.S. payment of compensation for the 40 Libyans killed and 220 injured in the 1986 United States bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi. On August 14, 2008, the U.S.-Libya Comprehensive Claims Settlement Agreement was signed in Tripoli. Former British Ambassador to Libya Oliver Miles described the agreement as “a bold step, with political cost for both parties” and wrote an article in the online edition of The Guardian querying whether the agreement is likely to work.[16]All this led up to a speech on Libyan state TV in the early days of the current revolution. Saif blamed the civil war on tribal factions and Islamists acting on their own agendas, drunken and drugged. He promised reforms, and said the alternative would be civil war causing no trade, no oil money, and the country taken over by foreigners.[22] He closed by saying, “We will not let Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and BBC trick us.”
Pressure is being put on the LSE to revoke Saif’s qualification[44] and investigate the claims.[45][46]