 |
| Saadi |
While his father Muammar spread terror around the world and raked in billions from oil reserves, Saadi grew up dreaming of fame and glamour.
He told his father he wanted to be a football star.
Rather than instilling the virtues of practice and discipline to achieve his goal, Muammar waited until Saadi was old enough and ordered a place be found for him in the country’s top football team.
As the new striker for Tripoli’s Al Ahli football club, Saadi was the only player to have his name on his shirt.
The others were known by their shirt numbers alone, so that Saadi’s was the only name mentioned in glowing radio commentary and press reports.
Despite showing little talent, Saadi was appointed captain of the Libyan national team. Referees were ordered on pain of death to give him favourable decisions and Gaddafi’s dreaded security services rounded up anyone heard criticising his performance.
Even then, Saadi, the most outlandish of the despot’s sons, was not happy. With the country under international sanctions, he complained that the world was not able to see him play.
So his father pumped millions into Perugia, the famous Italian football club, whose matches were televised globally — with one condition: that Saadi would have a starring role.
 |
Even footballing legend Diego Maradona was employed to coach the young Gaddafi in his dream to become a star player
|
To further bolster Saadi’s career, Diego Maradona, the Argentinian football star known for cocaine use, was employed to coach him.
 |
| Ben Johnson |
Ben Johnson, the disgraced Canadian Olympic sprinter who had been caught using steroids, was hired as his fitness coach.
But Saadi failed a drugs test after his first game for Perugia and was banned. A newspaper report of his only match in Italy stated that ‘even at twice his current speed he would still be twice as slow as slow itself’.
Another said he was ‘the worst player to ever appear on a football pitch’.
Saadi’s ill-fated excursion to Italy was, however, only a minor setback. He simply resumed playing in Libya, where any criticism of his performance would result in certain death. When he wasn’t on the pitch he was jetting around the world.
This gilded existence continued throughout his 20s and 30s, with a frenzy of parties, orgies and drug- taking, not to mention the regular spectacle of a drunken Saadi racing his Bugatti and Ferrari sports cars through the streets.
His tyrant father Muammar
But the good times are emphatically over for this wayward son of Gaddafi. After three years on the run, Saadi goes on trial on Monday and faces a possible death sentence for his role in atrocities carried out by his father’s regime.
After Muammar was killed by a mob in the town of Misrata during the 2011 Libyan uprising, Saadi fled south by car across the Sahara to Niger, after first trying to escape to Venezuela by private jet. He also begged South Africa for sanctuary.
He was returned to Libya last month under a cash deal made with Niger.
As he awaits his fate, he is being held in a prison not far from the wrecked palace where he once played in the tunnels.
His captors are the former rebels, now in power, who cornered his father in a ditch, tortured him with a rifle bayonet and shot him in the head.
After being jailed on his return to the country, Saadi — a vain man, who always kept his long hair oiled, coiffed and curled — was photographed by rebels as they shaved off clumps of his hair and beard as he cowered in a blue prison uniform.
He will be tried with his brother Saif, the former close confidant of Tony Blair and student of the London School of Economics. Saif has been held in a remote mountain town for the past two years and is due to face trial by video link from his cell. He, too, could face a death sentence.
Yet it is only now that the playboy footballer is in prison that one of his closest companions has revealed the depths of debauchery and depravity the dictator’s son indulged in.
Saadi had no hesitation in having complete strangers beaten if they looked at him the wrong way. Indeed, so bloodthirsty and out of control had he become that many Libyans believe his excesses sowed the seeds for the revolution that saw the people rise up in February 2011 after 42 years of Gaddafi’s rule.
Playing for top Libyan football team Al Ahli, he was the only player to have his name on his shirt
The revelations come from a young man called Reda Thawargi, a professional footballer, who grew up in poverty not far from the palace in Tripoli and had the misfortune to encounter the dictator’s son as he walked to football training 15 years ago. Saadi stopped Reda and started chatting about football. Saadi decided that the man should become his ‘official best friend’.
Reda was initially mesmerised by Saadi’s wealth and fame. Little did he suspect the nightmare to come.
First, the dictator’s son ordered Reda to give up football, a sport he had dedicated his life to.
‘Whenever I said I want to play, he said that I played too much,’ says Reda. ‘He wanted me to accompany him in all his travels, in his shopping. He’d say: “Come on, let’s go here! Come on, let’s go there!”
‘We would travel all over the world. He took at least 7,000 euros just for one day.
‘There was not a single place we went to where he did not get girls: all around the world wherever we went he got girls to go out with at night.’
Saadi would also pay international celebrities, including actress Nicole Kidnman and singer Beyonce, to attend parties with him.
‘Foreigners only came for money,’ says Reda, interviewed for Mad Dog: Inside The Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi, a documentary for America’s Showtime and the BBC.
‘He had to deposit the money first in order for them to meet him. He knew that he has to pay them to come; if he did not, they would not come.
‘He would rent accommodation for about 200,000 or 300,000 euros a month. We would eat in a restaurant and pay 40,000 or 50,000 euros for a meal.’
Saadi went shopping every day, buying the most expensive brands in each store on his Visa card. As well as being a notorious cocaine user and heavy drinker, Saadi also had sexual relations with men.
‘Yes, he liked boys as well,’ Reda confirms. ‘He used to watch DVDs of gay men playing football and he got boys that looked nice.’
It was this behaviour that spelled the beginning of the end of Reda’s friendship with the dictator’s son. It began to cool when Reda refused to help ‘warm up’ his friend with sexual acts before Saadi had sex with a girl.
‘I told him to talk to the girl to get him warmed up,’ says Reda. ‘He wanted me to perform a kiss on him and do other acts. All these things, I said no.’
Saadi with Italian actress Valeria Golino
His unwillingness to meet Saadi’s demands saw him thrown in one of Gaddafi’s notorious jails on trumped up charges of stealing cash from Saadi. He was left to rot there until the uprising.
Even as the revolution began, the vain and deluded Saadi believed he was on the brink of becoming a major player in Hollywood.
He used £100 million of his country’s money to set up a film company called Natural Selection and claimed to have attracted the interest of Oscar-winners such as Forest Whitaker and Adrien Brody.
When Saadi was in Libya he lived in a beach mansion near Tripoli, patrolled by armed guards with dogs trained to tear intruders limb from limb. Stone walls surrounded the ten acres of grounds, creating a private fortress.
Inside the compound, there was an outdoor disco, private football pitch and swimming pool. There were also three cell-like rooms and a caged building where Saadi is reputed to have unleashed his guard dogs on anyone who displeased him.
According to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, his antics — and particularly his sexual relations with men — infuriated his hitherto indulgent father, who put Saadi in charge of a unit of special forces during the 2011 uprising in a bid to toughen him up.
‘Saadi has a troubled past, including abuse of drugs and alcohol, excessive partying, travel abroad in contravention of his father’s wishes and profligate affairs with men and women,’ stated a cable written by a former American diplomat.
‘His bisexuality is reportedly a point of extreme contention with his father and partly prompted the decision to arrange his marriage.’
Saadi was married to the daughter of a senior military commander. But even marriage didn’t tame his appetites.
Saadi learnt all he knew about violence and sexual depravity from an expert: his dad. For, as well as being a killer and terrorist, Gaddafi senior was a sexual sadist who would select young girls from Libyan schools during official visits.
Those unfortunate enough to be selected — often girls barely into their teens — were taken to the dictator’s palace and forced to watch pornographic films before being raped by the leader. Abortions would be carried out on girls who fell pregnant.
What’s less well known is that Muammar Gaddafi was also bisexual — male as well as female victims were forced to have sex with him — making a mockery of his fury towards his son over his sexual proclivities.
Nuri Al-Mismari, the former chief of protocol for Gaddafi and a member of the dictator’s inner circle, tells a journalist in the documentary: ‘He (Gaddafi) was terribly sexually deviant; young boys and so on. He had his own boys. All of them were boys and bodyguards ... a harem for his pleasure.’
Today, with his father dead and buried in an unmarked grave in the Sahara, there is no one to intervene to save Saadi as he faces trial.
The country is still racked by violence and the rebel fighters now in government are bent on revenge. They will almost certainly press for the death sentence for Saadi and his brother Saif.
With the dictator and three of his other sons already dead, they remain determined to wipe the Gaddafi bloodline from the face of the earth.
