Speculation that the death of former Libyan oil kingpin Shokri Ghanem may have been something other than an accident has been given weight by revelations that Ghanem was wanted by Libyan authorities for questioning.
“Our request to bring him to Libya does not mean he is guilty, that is up to a court to decide,” Prosecutor General Abdelaziz Al-Hasadi told Reuters. Hasadi had passed an arrest warrant to Interpol but received no reply.
As head of the National Oil Corporation (NOC), Ghanem ran the Libyan oil industry for years under the Gaddafi regime before defecting in disgust at state killing of civilians. Wikileaks documents show Ghanem was subject to claims on Libyan crude shipments from members of the Gaddafi family.
After his defection Ghanem was trapped between rebel forces for whom he was a hated Gaddafi bureaucrat, and the Gaddafi family and the beneficiaries of its pyramidal system of bribes, favoritism, nepotism and corruption.
With the Libyan National Transitional Council’s announcement of a committee to investigate pre-war oil contracts and a parallel investigation by the prosecutor-general’s underway, Ghanem became seem as one of the most valuable sources of information on Libya’s oil industry under Gaddafi.
Austrian authorities have neither ruled out nor found evidence of foul play in Ghanem’s death.
