It was supposed to be an olive branch from the dictator's son, an apology for those who had died at the start of the Libyan uprising, a pledge to reform Muammar Gaddafi's four-decade old regime.
But when Saif Al Islam Gaddafi appeared on television on February 20 last year, he sounded just like his defiant and rambling father.
Wagging a finger at the camera, Saif Al Islam blamed Libyan exiles for fomenting the violence and warned of more bloodshed. There was mention of reform to Libya's constitution, but it was hardly an offer of compromise.
"We will keep fighting until the last man standing, even to the last woman standing," he said.
The speech, the first by a Gaddafi family member after Libya's uprising began on February 17, 2011, was all the more confrontational because of who made it.
Saif Al Islam Gaddafi had been hailed — at home and abroad — as the Western-educated, business-friendly face of Libya, a reformer who could bring the country back in from the cold. Here he was sounding like a belligerent hardliner.
His televised address three days into the rebellion, said a person who has spoken to its authors, was originally drafted with "conciliatory language — So when he came on TV, the people who helped draft the speech were flabbergasted. They realised, after all these years, he didn't mean anything. He completely reversed what he had portrayed himself to be."
The story of Saif Al Islam's reversion to type, his journey from great hope back to dictator's son, reveals a lot about the shifts inside Libya in the decade leading up to last year's rebellion. It is a story of would-be reforms, family feuds and dashed expectations. How it ends could be crucial to Libya's future.
Nine months on from the speech, just weeks after his father's gruesome death, Saif Al Islam, bearded, bedraggled and dressed as a Bedouin, was captured in the Sahara desert. Today the 39-year-old is Libya's most famous prisoner, the man at the centre of a struggle between the International Criminal Court, which has charged him as a co-perpetrator in crimes against humanity, and the Libyan government, which wants to try him for financial corruption, murder and rape.
Pressure is mounting on Libya to hand Gaddafi's son to the ICC. Human rights organisations say the country is unable to give him a fair trial. Tripoli says he should be judged at home.
On the beach
Saif Al Islam — the name means "the sword of Islam" — is the second eldest of Muammar Gaddafi's seven sons. He was born in June 1972, three years after his father took power in a military coup at the age of 27.
For much of his life, and especially in the years after the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner by Libyan agents over Lockerbie, Scotland, Saif Al Islam watched his father and country become more and more isolated.
Gaddafi senior called himself "Brother Leader of the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah" and described Libya's political system as a perfect democracy of the masses. But it was one which ruled by terror, hunted down opponents and televised executions.
Saif Al Islam enjoyed the advantages and protections of power, including an education that taught him a couple of the languages — English, German — of Libya's Western enemies.
Enass Ahmada, a 38-year-old Libyan journalist who would later work at one of Saif Al Islam's newspapers, remembers meeting Saif Al Islam at the beach as a teenager.
"He was talking and laughing about the girls around, and he pointed at me and made fun of me in English. He didn't know I understood," she said. Later, Ahmada and her sister joined Saif Al Islam and his friends in a discussion.
"I said something in English and he asked me whether I spoke English. When I said yes and told him I had understood his earlier comment ]about my size] he was ashamed," she said.
Saif Al Islam also swore at his companions. "He was saying bad words to his friends, swearing about their mothers, so my sister asked him why he was doing that and how would he feel if someone said the same thing to him," Ahmada said. "He laughed and said, ‘I am Saif, no one will swear about my mother.'"
After high school, Saif Al Islam studied architecture and engineering at Tripoli's Al Fatah University, where he was nicknamed "Engineer Saif." He studied business in Vienna and in 2002 headed to Britain to do a PhD at the prestigious London School of Economics.
The LSE forced him to take masters classes to prove his abilities before he could start the doctoral programme. Robert Wade, professor of political economy at the university, remembers receiving a call from a man who introduced himself as an education adviser for British defence firm BAE Systems. The man wanted to know what was covered in Wade's course, "The Global Political Economy of Development."
Charitable foundation
"Then it got a bit stranger," Wade said. "He began to ask about the physical layout of the lecture theatre and how many entrances and exits there were to the theatre. Then he said he was ringing on behalf of Saif Gaddafi and Saif wanted to know whether he could audit my course."
A BAE spokesman confirmed that an employee was seconded to work at Saif Al Islam's charitable foundation at that time "as part of the company's efforts to develop a market position in Libya." Those ties should be "seen in the context of the general effort of the British Government at the time to improve diplomatic relations with Libya and to encourage British business to identify local requirements which they could fulfil, subject to export control restrictions."
Saif Al Islam attended lectures with two bodyguards who stood at the lecture hall's exits. He was not marked for his work, as he took the course voluntarily.
"He sat on his own and he never brought a single notebook or recorder or computer or anything. He just came, he sat, listened."
The young Libyan would occasionally ask questions at the end of a lecture or come to see Wade in his office. "I got the impression of somebody who was very ignorant of this whole area of political economy, about the functioning of the world economy on a large scale but also how the World Bank, the IMF, WTO, how they worked," Wade said. "But he was very curious and genuinely concerned to learn."
And Saif Al Islam's lack of expertise in economics and diplomacy was offset by savvy in military affairs. Wade organised a dinner at a restaurant for Saif Al Islam, the Libyan's girlfriend, a colleague and his colleague's wife, an expert in military defence who teaches at another university.
"At dinner she sat next to him and they had a long conversation. She came out saying: ‘This guy is really well informed.' He clearly impressed her as a very knowledgeable person about those matters," he said.
Saif Al Islam cemented his ties with the LSE through his foundation, the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation. On the day of Saif Al Islam's PhD graduation in 2009, a donation of £1.5 million (Dh5.5 million) was agreed for the LSE's Centre for the Study of Global Governance. In the end, only the first instalment of £300,000 was paid.
When Libya's rebellion started last year, the university's ties to its former student prompted its director Howard Davies to resign.
The University of London, of which the LSE is part, investigated the authenticity of his thesis, "The role of civil society in the democratisation of global governance institutions: from ‘soft power' to collective decision-making?"Davies declined to comment. In his resignation letter he said that while there was no link between Gaddafi's degree and foundation donations, accepting the money was a mistake.
University officials decided not to revoke the Phd. An LSE spokesman said that "whatever one thinks of him, he spent many years studying — but those were legitimate questions and it was right the University of London looked into the provenance of the PhD. What the panel found in essence was that there isn't the evidence to justify revoking the PhD."
Saif Al Islam, said Wade, "was no kind of playboy, no kind of dunce who got other people to do whatever he was meant to write himself. That's just not true."
The reformer
While Saif Al Islam was abroad, Libya's relationship with the West began to thaw.
The young Gaddafi began working with academics, executives and consultants to plot a new future for his country. Though he occupied no formal political office, he wielded influence and soon came to be seen as a potential heir to his father.
"He really had a capacity to conduct a thoughtful conversation, a political conversation, a conversation about not just Libya but the future of civil society," said Benjamin Barber, an author and adviser to Saif Al Islam who also sat on the international board of his charitable Gaddafi Foundation.
"He really appreciated Western liberal democratic thought but he thought that it could never work in Libya without a major accommodation to the history of Libya, Libyan culture," said Barber.
Saif Al Islam played a central role in Tripoli's 2003 decision to abandon its nuclear and chemical weapons programmes and the following year helped negotiate the end to US and European sanctions on Libya over the Lockerbie bombing.
"He wanted a solution with the West," said Sa'ad Djebbar, an Algerian lawyer based in London who advised the Libyan government on the Lockerbie negotiations and who met Saif Al Islam while he was in Britain. "He wanted to do everything to open up to the West."
He pushed for more media freedom, acknowledgement of past rights abuses and the adoption of a constitution. His foundation was the closest thing Libya had to an ombudsman and was used as a point of contact for groups such as Human Rights Watch.
The International Criminal Court and Libya have locked horns over who will try him. Among other things at stake, the venue could determine how fully the trial exposes secrets about the Gaddafi regime's dealings with the West.
Saif Al Islam's supporters, including surviving siblings who found refuge abroad, say they doubt he will be given a fair trial in Libya. He faces a prison term if convicted by the ICC, and the death penalty if found guilty by a Libyan court.
"To me it's a great modern tragedy," adviser Barber said. "And if there was a modern Sophocles or Aeschylus around, they would write it."
