Reports have revealed that one of the surviving sons of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has been transferred from a Lebanese prison, where he had been on a hunger strike, to a hospital in critical condition.
The Dubai-based Al-Hadath TV, cited by Reuters news agency, stated that Hannibal Gaddafi experienced a significant drop in his blood sugar level.
Hannibal Gaddafi has been held in detention in Lebanon for over eight years.
In the month of June, he initiated a hunger strike to protest against his prolonged detention without trial.
He has been held in the country since his capture in Syria, where he had sought refuge following the assassination of his father by rebels in 2011.
William Burns makes a rare trip to Libya, where he meets Haftar, the military strongman based in the east, andinterim Prime Minister Dbeibah.
William Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has made a rare trip to Libya where he met with the interim prime minister a few weeks after the country’s authorities gave the United States a suspect in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, according to the Tripoli-based government.
The CIA director’s Thursday meeting in Tripoli, which was also covered by Libyan media, was part of his first trip to the country since the 2012 attack on a US mission in Benghazi, which left the ambassador and three other people dead.
The visit and the meeting with Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah were announced by his Government of National Unity on its Facebook page, where a picture of Burns and Dbeibah together was posted.
“Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibeh hosted the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns” at the cabinet office in Tripoli, along with Foreign Minister Najla al-Mangoush and Libyan intelligence chief Hussein al-Ayeb, Dbeibah’s government said in the post.
Burns “underlined the need to develop economic and security cooperation between the two countries”, it said.
Libyan media reported that Burns also met Khalifa Haftar, the eastern Libya-based military strongman who has attempted to march on Tripoli and overthrow the Government of National Unity in the past.
The meeting took place at Haftar’s headquarters in Benghazi.
The CIA, which does not regularly announce such visits, declined to comment.
The country has been de facto divided since 2014 between warring factions based in the west and east of the country.
Dbeibah’s government was installed through a United Nations-backed process in 2021 as part of a peace plan, but his administration is no longer recognised by the main political factions in the east.
Burns, CIA chief since March 2021, visited Libya in 2014 as undersecretary of state for the Middle East.
He was the first US official to visit the country when Washington was mending ties with the Gaddafi regime.
Last month, a Libyan man accused of making the bomb that took down a Pan Am flight over Scotland in 1988, appeared in a US court after being extradited by Dbeibah’s government.
Alleged former intelligence officer Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir al-Marimi could face life in prison if convicted of “destruction of an aircraft resulting in death” and two other related charges over the attack, which killed 270 people and was the deadliest-ever terror attack in Britain.
The move sparked a public backlash against the Tripoli-based government, with Dbeibah facing bitter criticism from political rivals, rights groups and relatives of Libyan detainees who fear being handed over themselves. Libya has no extradition treaty with Washington.
Former Black Starsgoalkeeper Joe Carr has narrated how the late Muammar Gadafi tried to give the squad some money before Ghana’s game against Libya in the 1982 Afcon final.
Carr stated that the Sports Minister for Libya promised them $5000 and he was ready to take the money.
On why the payment did not happen Carr added that Ghana’s president the late JJ Rawlings got a hint of the attempted bribery and sent a letter to the squad warning them.
“Nkrumah’s promises weren’t fulfilled same as Rawlings. Rawlings was the most painful one because before the finals Libya’s sports minister came and promised us $5000 each, if we let them win. They were hosting and Gaddafi wanted to win,” he said on Dan Kweku Yeboah TV as monitored by footballghana.com
“It seems someone told Rawlings, so he wrote a long letter and Akataporri who was the leader of the delegation came and read it to us”
We had already celebrated the 6th March and the match was on 7th March. So he read it and all that the letter entailed was that he has heard about the money issues if we don’t win the cup none of us should step foot in Ghana,”
