The most prominent son of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, has been killed, sources close to the family, his lawyer Khaled el-Zaydi, and Libyan media said on Tuesday.
Details surrounding the circumstances of his death were not immediately clear.
While Saif al-Islam is well-known in the north African country, especially for his role in shaping policy before 2011, his public profile has receded in recent years.
Despite holding no official position, Saif al-Islam was once seen as the most powerful figure in the oil-rich North African country after his father, Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled for more than four decades.
He led talks on Libya abandoning its weapons of mass destruction and negotiated compensation for the families of those killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Crushed dissent, then sought political comeback
In 2015, a Libyan court passed a death sentence in absentia on Saif al-Islam for suppressing peaceful protests during the country's 2011 revolution that ended his father's rule.
Speaking to Reuters at the time of the revolt, he said: "We fight here in Libya, we die here in Libya."
He warned that rivers of blood would flow and the government would fight to the last man and woman and bullet.
"All of Libya will be destroyed. We will need 40 years to reach an agreement on how to run the country, because today, everyone will want to be president, or emir, and everybody will want to run the country," he said, wagging his finger at the camera in a TV broadcast.
He has also been provisionally charged by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity, a case his lawyers failed to dismiss.
In 2021, Saif al-Islam registered as a presidential candidate for a December vote that eventually collapsed amid a political deadlock.
After rebels took over the capital, Tripoli, Saif al-Islam tried to flee to neighboring Niger dressed as a Bedouin tribesman.
The Abu Bakr Sadik Brigade militia captured him on a desert road and flew him to the western town of Zintan about one month after his father was hunted down and summarily shot dead by rebels.
"I'm staying here. They'll empty their guns into me the second I go out there," he said in comments captured in an audio recording as hundreds of men thronged around an old Libyan air force transport plane.
Saif al-Islam was betrayed to his rebel captors by a Libyan nomad.
He spent the next six years detained in Zintan, a far cry from the charmed life he had led under Gaddafi, when he had pet tigers, hunted with falcons, and mingled with British high society on trips to London.
After years underground in Zintan to avoid assassination, he was released by the militia in 2017 under an amnesty law. Since 2016, he has been allowed to contact people inside and outside Libya, said Mustafa Fetouri, a Libyan analyst with contacts in Saif al-Islam's inner circle.
Wearing a traditional Libyan robe and turban, he appeared in the southern city of Sabha in 2021 to file his candidacy for the presidential elections.
He had been expected to play on nostalgia for Libya's relative stability before the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled his father and ushered in years of chaos and violence.
However, his candidacy was controversial and opposed by many who had suffered under his father's rule. Powerful armed groups that emerged from the rebel factions that rose up in 2011 rejected it outright.
As the election process dragged on in late 2021 with no real agreement on the rules, Saif al-Islam's candidacy became a major point of contention.
Plan to come back to Libyan politics 'little by little'
He was disqualified because of his 2015 conviction, but when he tried to appeal the ruling, fighters blocked off the court. The ensuing arguments contributed to the collapse of the election process and Libya's return to political stalemate.
In a 2021 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Saif al-Islam discussed his political strategy. "I've been away from the Libyan people for 10 years," he said. "You need to come back slowly, slowly. Like a striptease. You need to play with their minds a little."
"After Saif al-Islam was freed a few years ago, he proved incapable of delivering speeches or producing public statements through the press or social media," said Jalel Harchaoui, a contributor to Britain's Royal United Services Institute think tank. "Yet his symbolic significance remained substantial. This symbolic stature constituted one of the main factors preventing the 2021 elections from proceeding."
"Now that he has been slain, most pro-Gaddafi factions will experience both diminished morale and anger. At the same time, one obstacle to holding elections in Libya has been removed," Harchaoui said.