THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: Col Muammar Gaddafi’s children have fled Algeria, fearing the oil-rich dictatorship’s improving relations with the new Libya authorities is undermining their safe haven.
Tight restrictions on the family and the prospect of a deal to allow Gaddafi’s widow back into Libya prompted the family to seek refuge elsewhere in Africa, regional officials said.
Reports in the Arabic press this week said that Aisha Gaddafi, the lawyer and most prominent member of the clan, had moved with her brother Hannibal and half-brother Mohammad to an African country.
Because of the UN flight ban on the Gaddafi inner circle, the siblings could most readily gain access to Niger, the impoverished Saharan state where a third brother, Saadi, lives on the presidential compound.
Niger is one of the few options open to the family as offers of asylum in Zimbabwe and Venezuela were impractical. Other countries are less reliable. Mauritania extradited Abdullah Senussi, Aisha’s uncle and Gaddafi’s intelligence chief back to Libya this summer.
A series of recent developments triggered the decision to leave the highly protected, secluded compound that the Gaddafis were granted inAlgerian government, a family associate said. “Definitely they wanted to get out,” he said.
Aisha Gaddafi is said to have grown increasingly frustrated with the restrictions on her communications imposed by the Algerian regime. » | Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent | Sunday, November 11, 2012
