Hannibal Gadhafi taken to hospital for third time

A son of late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was taken to hospital for the third time after his health deteriorated due to a hunger strike to protest his detention without trial in Beirut, Dubai-based Al-Hadath TV said.

Al-Hadath said Gadhafi was in "critical condition" after he suffered a sharp drop in his blood sugar level. He was taken to Beirut’s Hotel-Dieu de France hospital on Sunday.

Gadhafi, who started his hunger strike on June 3, was given supplements and asked to be taken back to the jail where he is held in Beirut, al-Jadeed TV said, adding that he fears for his life outside prison.

He had also been suffering back pain due to being held in a small room where he cannot move freely or exercise.

Hannibal Gadhafi has been detained in Lebanon since 2015 after he was briefly kidnapped from neighboring Syria, where he had been living as a political refugee.

He was abducted by Lebanese militants demanding information on the whereabouts of prominent Lebanese Shiite cleric Moussa al-Sadr, who went missing in Libya 45 years ago.

Lebanese police later announced it had collected Hannibal from the northeastern city of Baalbek where he was being held. He has been detained in a Beirut jail without trial since then.

The disappearance of al-Sadr in 1978 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 al-Sadr is dead. He would be 94 years old.

Al-Sadr was the founder of the Amal group, Arabic for “hope,” and an acronym for the group’s Arabic name, the Lebanese Resistance Brigades.

Most of al-Sadr’s followers are convinced that Moammar Gadhafi ordered al-Sadr killed in a dispute over Libyan payments to Lebanese militias. Libya has maintained that the cleric and his two traveling companions left Tripoli in 1978 on a flight to Rome and suggested he was a victim of a power struggle among Shiites.

Gadhafi was killed by opposition fighters in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of the north African country.

Hannibal Gadhafi was born two years before al-Sadr disappeared.