London: Sa’adi Gaddafi’s passion for football was once regarded merely as a joke. But Monday it will be paraded in evidence against the dictator’s son when he and his brother are put on trial.
As the full details of the strange and frequently violent crimes of Sa’adi and his elder brother, Saif Al Islam, are presented to the trial opening, the case against the former Libyan international striker will revolve around his connections to the game.
Saadi took over Tripoli’s leading club, Al Ahli and appointed himself national team captain. He bought his way into Italy’s Serie A by virtue of a Libyan stake in Juventus, and played a single game for Perugia then another for Udinese.
He was banned for failing a drugs test, but his two appearances were enough for him to be labelled the worst player to appear in the league. After the fall of his father’s regime, investigations by the revolutionary authorities, Libyan journalists and The Daily Telegraph uncovered a list of extraordinary incidents with which he was associated. Rumours had circulated for years.
At the end of the 1996 cup final, troops appeared on the pitch as the fans celebrated, and fired into the crowd. Witnesses told this newspaper that Sa’adi had been present, standing behind the red-capped soldiers. Al Ahli had won 1-0, and the common view was that he thought the crowd were jeering as a sign of opposition.
“Nobody was booing, they were just celebrating,” said Musbah Shengab, Al Ahli’s goalkeeper on the day. “I lay on the pitch as the bullets went overhead.” “They were shooting for 15 minutes,” said Hussain Salem, a fan who was standing near the tunnel. “It was entirely random.” Twenty people died.
Another explanation was that it was an attempt to distract attention from Libya’s worst mass killing, of 1,200 prisoners at Abu Salim prison two weeks earlier. Sa’adi escaped to Niger after the fall of his father’s regime in 2011 but was extradited to his homeland in March.
Also on trial will be Saif Al Islam, who was caught escaping across the Sahara in November 2011, a month after his father’s death, and Abdullah Senussi, Colonel Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and security chief, accused of overseeing the prison massacre. Senussi’s son Mohammad was implicated with Sa’adi in one of the charge sheet’s most inexplicable crimes: the disappearance in 2006 of Bashir Al Riani, once Libya’s most celebrated striker and later a commentator.
After Tripoli fell, The Daily Telegraph found Riani’s wife, Hamid Bin Mansour, who described her husband’s final days. He had been taken up as a mascot by Saadi, until he tried to extricate himself from the relationship, alarmed by the heavy partying and threats of violence.
One day, a car arrived to “take him to dinner”. A few days later, his son and brother-in-law found his body at the Tripoli Medical Centre. A policeman said it had been picked up from Sa’adi’s beachside villa.
In the years since, they learnt that the fatal blow was struck by Mohammad Senussi, who was killed with another of Gaddafi’s sons, Khamis, in the retreat from Tripoli. Sa’adi also flew women into Tripoli from around Europe, although another Al Ahli footballer, Reda Thawargi, alleged he was jailed for refusing his homosexual advances. In contrast to the more lurid allegations, the most important charges against the brothers will be mundane by comparison.
They are accused of issuing orders for the crackdown that led to the 2011 uprising against their father’s rule. Saif has claimed he urged his father to reform, but was sidelined. When he appears in court, by video link from his prison in the city of Zintan, he will present himself as sincere.
Despite having moments of hedonism — and a hobby of keeping pet tigers — he took himself more seriously than Sa’adi, gaining a PhD in politics and putting forward theories for reforming government and the world economic order.
However, his credentials as a reformist are open to question. His PhD thesis, from the London School of Economics, was found to have been partly plagiarised. His accusers will say the speeches in which he wagged his fingers at protesters and threatened them, as his father’s gunmen took to the streets, reflect the real man.
In Libya’s uncertain political environment, no one can predict whether the trial will be fair. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Saif, though not Sa’adi. But it looks most likely that it will be in Libya that the brothers will learn their fate, and some sort of justice will be meted out.
