Hannibal Gaddafi, the youngest son of the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, has been released by Lebanon after nearly 10 years in detention without trial.

The Lebanese authorities seized Mr Gaddafi, now 49, in 2015, accusing him of concealing information about the fate of a Lebanese Shia cleric who disappeared in Libya in 1978, when he was just two.

Human rights groups had denounced the accusations.

His lawyer told the AFP news agency his $900,000 (£682,938) bail had been paid.

Laurent Bayon said: “It’s the end of a nightmare for him that lasted 10 years.”

In October, a judge set a $11m bail against Gaddafi’s release but this was reduced last week after an appeal by his defence team, according to AFP.

Mr Bayon said his client would leave Lebanon for a “confidential” destination.

“If Gaddafi was able to be arbitrarily detained in Lebanon for 10 years, it’s because the justice system was not independent,” Bayon said, according to AFP.

In 2015, Mr Gaddafi was briefly abducted by an armed group in Lebanon before being freed. He was later detained by Lebanese authorities.

After his father was overthrown by rebels and killed in 2011, he fled to Syria and then had lived under house arrest in Oman with his wife Aline Skaf.

Before the fall of his father’s regime Mr Gaddafi was known for his lavish lifestyle.

The disappearance of Shia cleric Musa al-Sadr in Libya in 1978 has been a source of tension between Libya and Lebanon for decades.

Hannibal Gaddafi was only two at the time and held no senior position in Libya as an adult.

Source: BBC

Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina left the country on Sunday evening after factions of the army rallied behind the protesters who have been staging weeks of demonstrations.

After a stopover on France’s Reunion Island, Rajoelina reportedly arrived in Dubai on Monday morning.

Madagascar has been engulfed in a political crisis since late last month as Gen Z protesters led mass demonstrations against the crippling water and electricity outages in the country. Rajoelina’s sacking of the country’s energy minister and later the entire government in late September did little to quell the unrest.

Groups of Madagascar soldiers joined the youth-led movement in the capital over the weekend and said that they would refuse orders to shoot.

Rajoelina “left in his helicopter from the presidential palace to the island of Sainte-Marie, in the east of the country, where a French military aircraft was waiting for him”, Borgia said, citing information obtained from Madagascar Aviation, a Facebook group for aviation enthusiasts that tracks flight itineraries.

“The transfer lasted a few minutes at the very end of the runway. No one saw the president board the military aircraft, and thanks to the French army, he was able to reach the island of Réunion. There, another plane was waiting for him,” Borgia said.

“A private jet from the German company Vistajet took the president to Dubai, where he arrived this Monday morning,” she added.

Source: France 24

Former Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila has been sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes and treason.

The charges concern accusations that Kabila has been supporting the M23, a rebel group who have wreaked devastation across the country’s eastern region.

Kabila was convicted on Friday by a military court of treason, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, including murder, sexual assault, torture and insurrection. He denied the charges, but did not appear in court to defend himself.

The ex-president rejected the case as “arbitrary” and said the courts were being used as an “instrument of oppression”. His current whereabouts are unknown.

The 54-year-old led DR Congo for 18 years, after succeeding his father Laurent, who was shot dead in 2001.

Kabila handed power to President Félix Tshisekedi in 2019, but they later fell out and Kabila went into self-imposed exile in 2023.

In April this year, the former president said he wanted to help find a solution to the deadly fighting in the east and arrived in the M23-held city of Goma the following month.

President Tshisekedi accused Kabila of being the brains behind the M23 and senators stripped him of his legal immunity, paving the way for his prosecution.

Decades of conflict had escalated earlier this year when the M23 seized control of large parts of the mineral-rich east, including Goma, the city of Bukavu and two airports.

Pointing to overwhelming evidence, the UN and several Western countries have accused neighbouring Rwanda of backing the M23, and sending thousands of its soldiers into DR Congo.

But Kigali denies the charges, saying it is acting to stop the conflict from spilling over onto its territory.

A ceasefire deal between the rebels and the government was agreed in July, but the bloodshed has continued.

Source: BBC

Under President Donald Trump the United States has reset relations with west Africa’s military leaders on a mutual back-scratching basis, bartering help fighting jihadists for the Sahel region’s mining riches, experts say.

While Joe Biden was in office the US suspended most of the development and military aid it sent to Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the wake of the rash of coups that brought juntas to power in the three restive countries between 2020 and 2023.

Trump’s return to the White House has shifted the US away from that stance, as part of a wider pivot in Washington’s African foreign policy and its attempts to counter Russia and China’s influence on the continent.

“Trade, not aid … is now truly our policy for Africa,” Troy Fitrell, the State Department’s top official for African affairs, told an audience in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in May.

In recent weeks several other senior American figures have paid visits to the capitals of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which have all been struggling to root out jihadists linked to al Qaeda or the Islamic State group for more than a decade.

In early July, Rudolph Atallah, a security and counterterrorism adviser to Trump, visited Mali to offer the “American solution” for the unrest.

“We have the necessary equipment, the intelligence and the forces to stand up to this menace. If Mali decides to work with us, we’ll know what to do,” Atallah was quoted as saying by the country’s state newspaper.

Several days later, William B. Stevens, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for West Africa, likewise raised the possibility of private American investment in the anti-jihadist fight to an audience in the Malian capital Bamako, after stop-offs in Ouagadougou and Niamey.

“Washington offered to kill the leaders of jihadist groups, in exchange for access to lithium and gold for American businesses,” said Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel programme at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Germany’s conservative CDU party.

Trump has brought US access to key minerals front and centre of his negotiations with foreign countries, including in his attempts to end the Russia-Ukraine war and the long-running conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Lithium, gold, uranium

Mali is among Africa’s top producers of gold and lithium, a key component in the electric car batteries necessary for the transition to a low-carbon economy in the age of climate change.

Burkina Faso likewise possesses rich veins of gold, while Niger’s uranium deposits make the desert nation among the world’s top exporters of the radioactive metal.

Although all three Sahel juntas came to power while promising the people greater control and sovereignty over their country’s mineral wealth, the officers in charge have welcomed Washington’s change in tack.

“We have to look at investment, the potential of our countries,” said Mali’s Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop in July, hailing “today’s convergence of viewpoints between the American administration and the government of Mali”.

Laessing argued that “some officials in the State Department, worried about the end of USAID and the closure of embassies, pointed out Mali’s rich resources to the Trump administration as a way to encourage it to remain engaged and keep the American embassy in Bamako open, at a point where Russia and China are expanding their influence in the region.”

But for Liam Karr, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, any critical minerals deal would be “a much longer-term project”.

“The terrorism threat is the biggest issue … stabilising the region is key to any investment hopes,” Karr argued.

‘American mercenaries’

Washington’s courting of the Sahel states comes despite the juntas pivoting towards Russia, having cut ties with the West and former imperial ruler France in particular since the coups.

Moscow has sent mercenaries from the infamous Wagner paramilitary organisation, and its successor the Africa Corps, to help the Sahel countries’ armies push back the jihadists.

After Niger nationalised the local branch of French uranium giant Orano, the Kremlin, which commands the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, said it wished to mine the radioactive metal in the west African country itself.

So far, Russia’s foothold in the region has yet to provoke the White House’s ire.

In his visit to Mali, security adviser Atallah said he saw no problem with Moscow’s presence in the region, insisting that the country was “free to choose its partners”.

“Since the French were kicked out … and Russia welcomed into the region, Trump sees no problem in accompanying and/or supporting Russian efforts in the region. The fact that the Russians eschew democratic values and human rights promotion also aligns with the Trump administration’s transactional approach to relations between states,” Bisa Williams, a former US ambassador to Niger, told AFP.

Williams, now a consultant and academic, said Trump could strike an agreement that “would guarantee majority or near-majority ownership and a high percentage of extracted minerals in exchange for support fighting terrorism”.

That could involve the deployment of American mercenaries, along the lines of how Russia used Wagner, Williams said.

“That way, he wouldn’t have to defend the policy before Congress or his MAGA base.”

Source: AFP

The US will require citizens from Malawi and Zambia to pay a $15,000 (£11,300) deposit for a tourist or business visa, according to the US state department.

The 12-month pilot programme aims to curb visa overstays “or where screening and vetting information is considered deficient”, according to a notice published by the state department.

Officials say that citizens of countries other than Malawi and Zambia may soon also need to pay a similar deposit, which will be returned at the end of their visit to the US.

The US administration has taken several steps to further President Donald Trump’s agenda of stemming illegal immigration.

Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term to this effect.

The state department notice, published on Tuesday, says: “Aliens applying for visas as temporary visitors for business or pleasure (B-1/B-2) and who are nationals of countries identified by the Department as having high visa overstay rates, where screening and vetting information is deemed deficient, or offering Citizenship by Investment, if the alien obtained citizenship with no residency requirement, may be subject to the pilot program.

“Consular officers may require covered non-immigrant visa applicants to post a bond of up to $15,000 as a condition of visa issuance, as determined by the consular officers.”

Figures published in 2023 by the US Department of Homeland Security show that about 14% of visitors from Malawi overstay their visas, compared to 11% of Zambian visitors.

Other countries with high overstay rates include Haiti (31%), Myanmar (27%) and Yemen (20%).

Zambia Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe told the BBC that the government was “engaging our counterparts to get a full understanding of the implications and what can be done, if anything, to address the underlying issues”.

Since coming to office in January, Trump has signed orders to roll back humanitarian programmes for migrants from certain countries who are already in the US.

The Republican president has also banned foreign nationals from 12 countries from travelling to the US, and imposed partial restrictions on another seven.

His administration has revoked visas for hundreds of international students and detained several others on college campuses across the US, often without any warning or recourse for appeals.

The state department has said it is targeting those who were involved in activities that “run counter” to US national interests.

Many of those targeted have participated in some form of pro-Palestinian activity.

But there have been other cases where cancellations appear to be connected to those with some sort of criminal record, or legal infractions like driving over the speed limit, immigration lawyers have said.

Source: BBC