ZINTAN/TRIPOLI – A spokesman for Libya’s interim administration, the National Transitional Council (NTC), said yesterday that local officials in the desert town of Sabha had confirmed the capture of Muammar Gadafy’s intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi.
A day after Gadafy’s son Saif al- Islam was captured in the same region, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga told a news conference that Senussi – Muammar Gadafy’s brother-in-law and loyal confidant – had been seized.
Earlier, an NTC military official said Senussi had been surrounded at a house owned by his sister.
Saif al-Islam Gadafy (39) spent yesterday secreted in the militia stronghold of Zintan while in Tripoli, the Libyan rebel leaders who overthrew his father tried to resolve their differences and form a government that can try the new captive.
With rival local militia commanders from across the country trying to parlay their guns into cabinet seats, officials in the capital gave mixed signals on how long the prime minister-designate, Abdurrahim El-Keib, may need to form his full team.
Although the Zintan mountain fighters who intercepted the heir to the four-decade Gadafy dynasty deep in the Sahara said they would hand him over once some central authority was clear, few expect Saif al-Islam in Tripoli soon.
One senior member of the outgoing interim executive told Reuters he expected Keib to announce his line-up today, ahead of a deadline of tomorrow determined by a timetable that started with the killing of Muammar Gadafy a month ago.
Members of the NTC, the self-appointed legislative panel of notables formed after February’s uprising began, expect to vote on Keib’s nominees, with keenest attention among the men who control the array of militias on the streets focused on the defence ministry.
One official working for the NTC said that the group from Zintan, a town of just 50,000 in the Western Mountains outside Tripoli that was a stronghold of resistance to Gadafy, might even secure that ministry thanks to holding Saif al-Islam.
Other groups include rival Islamist and secularist militias in the capital, those from Benghazi, Libya’s second city and the original seat of revolt, and the fighters from the third city of Misurata, who took credit for capturing and killing the elder Gadafy.
“The final act of the Libyan drama,” as a spokesman for the former rebels put it, began in the blackness of the Sahara night, when a small unit of fighters from the town of Zintan, acting on a tip-off, intercepted Gadafy and four armed companions driving in a pair of 4x4 vehicles on a desert track.
It ended, after a 300-mile flight north on a cargo plane, with the London-educated younger Gadafy held in a safe house in Zintan and the townsfolk vowing to keep him safe until he could face a judge in the capital.
The familiar sound of celebratory gunfire broke the night-time silence but the town nestled in the rugged Western Mountains was otherwise quiet.
His captors said he was “very scared” when they first recognised him, despite the heavy beard and enveloping Tuareg robes and turban he wore. But they reassured him and, by the time a Reuters correspondent spoke to him aboard the plane, he had been chatting amiably to his guards.
“He looked tired. He had been lost in the desert for many days,” said Abdul al-Salaam al-Wahissi, a Zintan fighter involved in the operation. “I think he lost his guide.” – (Reuters)