Hannibal Muammar Gaddafi

Biography

Gaddafi was born in Tripoli, the Libyan Arab Republic. He started his maritime career by joining the Marine Academy of Maritime Studies/Libya in 1993 as a Deck Cadet. He graduated in 1999, as a watch keeping officer with a BSc degree in marine navigation.

Soon after he started his maritime career on board various types of GNMTC vessels on various ranks, he obtained successfully the combined chief officer and Master Mariner qualification from the Arab Maritime Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Alexandria in 2003.

Gaddafi was the first consultant to the Management Committee of the General National Maritime Transport Company (GNMTC) of Libya. He was appointed to this position in 2007, upon earning his MBA degree in Shipping Economics and Logistics from Copenhagen Business School.

Gaddafi is married to Aline Skaf, a Lebanese Christian former lingerie model, with whom he has two children.

Legal issues

In 2008, Swiss authorities arrested Gaddafi and his wife, Aline Skaf, on charges of "bodily harm, threatening behaviour and coercion," after an incident involving two of their staff at the Gaddafis' hotel in Geneva. The charges were later dropped, but relations between Libya and Switzerland soured. In 2009, two Swiss citizens, Max Goeldi and Rachid Hamdani, were detained in Libya; the Swiss government asserted that the detention was done as retaliation against them for Gaddafi's arrest.

Also in 2008, Gaddafi lost a lawsuit he brought in Denmark against the Danish newspaper, Ekstra Bladet. The newspaper reported that in 2005, Gaddafi, then a student in Copenhagen, had directed the abduction and beating of a Libyan national at the home of the Libyan consul in Gentofte. Gaddafi failed to appear in court to present his side of the case, and the court ruled that the existing evidence supported Ekstra Bladet's version of events.

In 2009, police were called to Claridge's Hotel in London in response to reports of a woman screaming. When they arrived, the suite was locked and three bodyguards were arrested for obstructing entry. Gaddafi's wife, Aline Skaf, was found in the room bleeding heavily and was taken by ambulance to hospital where she was treated for facial injuries.

2011 Libyan civil war

On 29 August after the rebels entered Tripoli, Gaddafi and his wife fled from Libya to Algeria together with other members of the Gaddafi family. In October 2012 they left a hideaway in Algeria to go to Oman, where they were granted political asylum.

Shweyga Mullah, an Ethiopian nanny who cared for the couple's young daughter and son was found abandoned by the rebels in a room at one of the family's luxury seaside villas in western Tripoli. She claimed that Aline Skaf took her to a bathroom, tied her up, taped her mouth and started pouring the boiling water on her head - after she lost her temper when Mullah refused to beat her daughter who was crying. Then Mullah was denied sleep, food and water for three days. Another member of staff, who did not want to give his name, verified Ms Mullah's story and said that he also had been regularly beaten and slashed with knives.

After Civil War

On 11 December 2015, Hannibal was kidnapped and briefly held in Lebanon by an armed group demanding information about disappearance of Shiite Imam Musa al-Sadr but later was released in the city of Baalbek. An arrest warrant was issued against him by the Lebanese government over the disappearance of al-Sadr and he was arrested. A request by the Syrian government to return Gaddafi on the grounds that he was a "political refugee" was denied by the Lebanese government as he is a wanted man in Lebanon for withholding information regarding the disappearance of al-Sadr. In August 2016, al-Sadr's family filed a lawsuit against Gaddafi over his role in the disappearance of the Imam.