Exactly 72 days have passed since the assassination of Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi. On 3 February 2026, in Zintan, a four-man hit squad eliminated the last “wild card” in Libya’s stagnant power play. The brazenness of the broad-daylight attack signalled a terrifying confidence, suggesting that the killers knew they had nothing to fear from the law.

While initial headlines focused on “masked gunmen” and “disabled cameras”, the subsequent silence is more telling. In a country where every skirmish is live-streamed, the investigation into Saif’s murder has become a black hole. Despite the Prosecutor General’s Office identifying three suspects in March, the trail has since gone cold with clinical precision.

The Prosecutor General claims the killers’ identities and route are known, yet 72 days later, no names or photos have been released. While social media is rife with theories linking the hit to internal factions or foreign intelligence, official silence remains absolute. This lack of transparency suggests that the perpetrators were not “unidentified gunmen”, but professionals acting with a mandate, shielded by the political environment they helped to stabilise.

Two major questions dominate the aftermath: one legal and the other political. Even if the Prosecutor General arrests the suspects, a public trial is unlikely. Under Libyan law, premeditated murder carries the death penalty, specifically by firing squad. Sceptics doubt that any suspect would reach the stand alive to confess. If the perpetrators were paid millions, as rumoured, the real question is not who pulled the trigger, but whose coffers funded the hit.

In Libya’s notorious landscape of fractured law and order, legal convictions and procedures are never straightforward. Once suspects are definitively identified by the Prosecutor General, the question of their tribal affiliations immediately takes centre stage.

Identifying the killers publicly would place their respective tribes in a zero-sum dilemma: they must either surrender their sons to face the death penalty and the potential wrath of their own kin, or protect them, thereby becoming complicit in a crime of such........

© Middle East Monitor