NYT: Qaddafi Is Said to Survive NATO Airstrike That Kills Son
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi survived a NATO airstrike on Saturday night that struck a house in Tripoli containing several of his family members and killed his youngest son and three of the colonel’s grandchildren, a Libyan government spokesman announced early Sunday. “This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country,” said Moussa Ibrahim, the government spokesman, adding that the airstrike proved that the NATO air campaign “has no moral foundation, no legal foundation and no political foundation.” Mr. Ibrahim identified the dead son as Seif al-Arab Muammar el-Qaddafi, 29. He said that Colonel Qaddafi and his wife, who were in the son’s house along with “friends and relatives,” were not wounded in the attack. The son who was said to be killed has a lower profile than much of the Qaddafi family. Western officials have said that he made his home in Munich most of the time, and did not seem to play as much of a role in Libya’s everyday affairs as some of his older siblings (including one with a similar name, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi). He has a reputation as a playboy, and the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported in 2007 about an incident in which he was briefly detained by the Munich police after getting into a fight with a nightclub bouncer; no charges were filed.
