There was a curious item in the news earlier this month. The Associated Press reported,
The son of Libya’s late leader Moammar Gadhafi has been kidnapped in Lebanon by militants demanding information about the fate of a Shiite cleric who went missing in Libya decades ago.
Hannibal Gadhafi appeared in a video aired late Friday on local Al-Jadeed TV saying anyone who has information about Imam Moussa al-Sadr should come forward.
Gadhafi appeared to have been beaten up and had black eyes but said in the video he is “in good health, happy and relaxed.”
Hannibal is used to doing the beating up, actually. I chronicle some of his crimes in Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.
“Possibly the most thuggish of the Qaddafi sons was Hannibal.” Yes — and he had stiff competition from certain of his brothers. He was always being arrested in Western European capitals and being bailed out by his father’s regime. This happened in Rome, where he attacked police at the Hilton. It happened in Paris, where he led police on a high-speed chase. (Hannibal was in his black Porsche, drunk.)
It happened again in Paris, when he beat the hell out of his girlfriend, Aline Skaf, a Lebanese lingerie model. She was eight months pregnant. Hannibal later married her. Remarkably enough, she married him, too.
It happened in Geneva, when Hannibal and Aline, together, beat the hell out of two of their servants. It happened in London on Christmas Eve 2009. Police were called to Claridge’s, where, in their suite, Hannibal had beaten Aline to a pulp.
Aline herself was a torturer. This was discovered at the end of the Libyan Civil War, when an Ethiopian servant of the Qaddafis — a woman named Shweyga Mullah — was found in horrific condition. Aline had put her in that condition.
Moammar Qaddafi had seven sons — a rich harvest, in a culture that especially prizes sons. Three of them died with him in the civil war. Two of them, including Hannibal, fled to Algeria, and then to the Gulf. The other two are imprisoned, somehow and somewhere, in Libya.
What was Hannibal doing in Lebanon? I don’t know. Visiting his in-laws?
When the war started, he was in the process of having a cruise liner built to his specs. One of those specs was a shark tank. Just sayin’.
Anyway, there’s more in that book …