Saif may spell dawn or doom as nation struggles to break away

London: Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son was educated in London and has friends in the City, Westminster and among royalty.

Or he did until last week's extraordinary events.

Geneva places a high premium on guarding secrets, but rumours are a different currency. Amid momentous scenes being played out across the Middle East last week, sources in the Swiss financial centre were privately gossiping about a visit to Geneva earlier this year by Farhat Bengdara, the governor of the Central Bank of Libya.

According to one popular rumour, Bengdara had visited Geneva with a purpose. He was there to make changes to key Swiss accounts, into which flow hundreds of millions of dollars of Libyan oil money that are then allocated to the Libyan Investment Authority and the Libyan Central Bank.

New names

Financiers in Geneva gossip that, as far back as January 17, Bengdara established that four new names would be added as signatories on three crucial accounts controlling much of the money. The signatories were Colonel Muammar Gaddafi; his son Khamis, who heads Libya's infamous martyrs' battalion; the Libyan leader's daughter Aisha; and his son Saif Al Islam.

Where Libya's petro-dollars may have been channelled in the weeks since tensions first erupted across the Arab world is hard to say. But those who know him would be surprised if Saif did not hold the answers.

The westernised 38 year old, who studied at the London School of Economics and enjoys close friendships with senior British politicians and financiers, has become the focal point of the conflict now threatening to rip Libya apart.

Whereas Gaddafi senior has always been seen in the west as a dictator — albeit one brought back into the fold — Saif, a trained architect who established a medical charity and was considered his father's heir apparent, held out the promise of a new dawn.

As far back as 2002, Saif told an interviewer that Libya needed democracy.

With mercenaries flooding the streets of Libya's major cities and horrifying stories of murder and mayhem emerging in piecemeal fashion via social networking sites, despite a government-enforced news blackout, such a promise now looks spent.

Saif's desire to act as a mouthpiece for his father has lent the tragic scenes unfolding in Libya a surreal, sometimes ridiculous dimension. His appearances in front of the television cameras suggest a man increasingly unhinged.

Arms folded, jaw firmly out, Saif is a manifestation of defiance. It is clear he is very much his father's son, albeit, as one Twitter user wryly observed, someone who seems to have styled himself sartorially on Stringer Bell, the drug lord in the US cop show The Wire.

Characteristics

The similarities may not stop there. A man who reportedly likes to keep tigers and falcons, "Saif is urbane, charming and psychotic", according to one person who has met him.

This appraisal seemed to be confirmed last Sunday night when Saif appeared on domestic television to threaten a civil war in which his father's regime "will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet".

By Thursday he was on CNN promising that the violence in his country would make Libya "stronger, more united".

Saif pledged: "Libya will have a better future as one united nation. [We will] not let a bunch of terrorists control our country and our future."