Lebanon issues arrest warrant for Gaddafi's son

BEIRUT - Lebanon issued an arrest warrant on Monday for Hannibal Gaddafi, son of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, for withholding information on a former Lebanese Shiite spiritual leader who disappeared in Libya.

Hannibal was handed over to the Lebanese authorities on Friday after being abducted briefly by an armed group. He was interrogated throughout the day at the Justice Palace, the National News Agency (NNA) said.

A lawsuit was filed against Hannibal on Monday by the lawyer of Imam Moussa al-Sadr, a former spiritual leader of the Muslim Shiites in Lebanon. Al-Sadr disappeared in 1978 in Libya while on a trip with another cleric and a journalist.

In 2008, the Lebanese judiciary indicted the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi over al-Sadr's disappearance, although Libya had consistently denied the accusation and claimed that the imam and his companions had left Libya for Italy.

According to LBCI television, Hannibal confessed that the Libyan regime was involved in the abduction of Imam al-Sadr, adding that "the sources of his information" were his brother Seif al-Islam and a former intelligence official.

On Friday, Hannibal appeared in a video announcing that he had been kidnapped in Lebanon and describing his captors as "loyal to the cause of Imam Moussa al-Sadr."

The NNA said that he was abducted on Thursday "after being lured from Syria into a town near Baalbek," about 85 km northeast of Beirut, and that his captors had demanded "information about al-Sadr and his two companions."