Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was shot 19 times inside his compound in Zintan, a mountain town in western Libya, where he had lived since his capture in 2011. Four masked men entered the compound after disabling the security cameras. Roughly 90 minutes earlier, his guards had withdrawn from the area for reasons that remain unexplained. When the shooting ended, the assailants did not flee. They left. No gunfight. No pursuit. No claim of responsibility. The perpetrators vanished into the kind of silence that, in Libya, usually means the killers have nothing to fear from an investigation.
Saif was the son of Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled Libya for more than four decades before being overthrown and killed in the 2011 revolution. Since 2014, the country has been divided between two rival power centres. In the west, successive governments in Tripoli, the latest led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, derive their authority from United Nations recognition. In the east, renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar controls territory through military force, backed by the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Egypt, while a paper government in Benghazi provides civilian cover for what is effectively military rule. Neither side has faced a national election, nor intends to.
The mechanics of the killing tell their own story. This was not violence born of chaos. It was an operation, executed within a narrow window by actors who understood Saif’s movements, his protection, and the informal rules governing both. Members of his inner circle have described it as an inside job. Reaching him required more than weapons. It required access to his routines, to his guards, and to the layered arrangements that had kept him alive in secret. For years, Saif had lived in varying degrees of concealment, protected by local understandings and, at times, by Russian-linked security support. By the night of the attack, all that protection had been withdrawn. Whoever planned the operation knew it would be.
Motive alone is not evidence. But method and capability narrow the field.
When Abdelghani al-Kikli, the commander of Tripoli’s largest militia, Stabilisation Support Apparatus (SSA), was assassinated last year by a rival brigade, the result was immediate chaos. Armed clashes shut down large parts of the capital – factional and noisy, and instantly legible. The Zintan operation bears no resemblance. Its precision and the silence that followed point to a different kind of actor. Critics, liabilities, and inconvenient figures within Haftar’s orbit have often been removed quietly. Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a senior officer in Haftar’s forces and a man wanted by the International Criminal Court, was shot dead in broad daylight in Benghazi in 2021. No serious investigation followed. Others have disappeared in a similar fashion. These operations do not require total territorial control. They rely on networks, intimidation and the expectation of impunity.
None of these constitutes proof. Libya rarely offers proof. Only patterns. But patterns have infrastructure.
The political order Muamm