BEIRUT: Lebanese authorities lifted a travel ban and reduced bail for the son of late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi paving the way for his release, judicial officials and one of his lawyers said Thursday.
The decision by the country’s judicial authorities came days after a Libyan delegation visited Lebanon and made progress in talks for the release of Hannibal Qaddafi.
In mid-October, a Lebanese judge ordered Qaddafi’s release on $11 million bail, but banned him from traveling outside Lebanon. His lawyers said at the time that he didn’t have enough to pay that amount, and sought permission for him to leave the country.
On Thursday, his bail was reduced to 80 billion Lebanese pounds (about $900,000) and the travel ban was lifted allowing him to leave the country once he pays the bail, three judicial officials and one security official said.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said Qaddafi has decided to leave Lebanon once he is released. They added that his family will follow him later.
“We have just been informed and will discuss the matter,” one of Qaddafi’s lawyers, Charbel Milad Al-Khoury, told The Associated Press when asked about the decision.
Lebanese authorities have been holding Qaddafi for 10 years without trial for allegedly withholding information about a missing Lebanese cleric.
Detained in Lebanon since 2015, Qaddafi is accused of withholding information about the fate of Lebanese Shiite cleric Moussa Al-Sadr who disappeared during a trip to Libya in 1978, although the late leader’s son was less than 3 years old at the time.
Libya formally requested Hannibal Qaddafi’s release in 2023, citing his deteriorating health after he went on a hunger strike to protest his detention without trial.
Qaddafi had been living in exile in Syria with his Lebanese wife, Aline Skaf, and children until he was abducted in 2015 and brought to Lebanon by Lebanese militants who were demanding information about Al-Sadr.
Lebanese police later announced they had seized Qaddafi from the northeastern Lebanese city of Baalbek where he was being held, and he has been held ever since in a Beirut jail, where he faced questioning over Al-Sadr’s disappearance.
The case has been a long-standing sore point in Lebanon. The cleric’s family believes he may still be alive in a Libyan prison, though most Lebanese presume he is dead. He would be 96 years old.
Al-Sadr, who went missing with companions Abbas Badreddine and Mohammed Yacoub, was the founder of a Shiite political and military group that took part in the long Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, largely pitting Muslims against Christians.
Muammar Qaddafi was killed by opposition fighters during Libya’s 2011 uprising-turned-civil war, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country.