Gadhafi Son's Possible Presidential Run Adds Strain to Troubled Peace Process 

Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, son of the late Libyan autocrat Moammar Gadhafi, hasn’t been seen in public since his rebel captors released him from detention in 2017. But he appears now to be mulling a run for the presidency of the war-torn north African country in elections the United Nations and Western powers are pressing for in December.  

The prospect of Saif figuring in the elections is unnerving Western diplomats and international democracy advisers, who say Libya’s troubled peace process has enough major obstacles to overcome without Gadhafi’s son, a highly polarizing figure, getting involved.   “What I hear is that he is more vengeful than conciliatory,” says Mary Fitzgerald, a researcher and associate fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization, King’s College London. Fitzgerald, a former Irish Times newspaper reporter, covered the 2011 Libyan civil war that ended with Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster and death.   Saif, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war-crime charges, has been talking via intermediaries with Western media. A major U.S. newspaper has conducted a formal interview with him, which is slated for publication next month, intermediaries say.