Political assassinations: Libya’s yesterday and today

The killing of Libyan journalist and BBC broadcaster Mohamed Mustafa Ramadan outside London’s Central Mosque in 1980, and the recent assassination of Major General Fawzi al‑Mansouri, head of military intelligence in eastern Libya, as he left a mosque in Benghazi, are separated by nearly half a century. Yet the architecture of eliminating opponents has barely changed. The mindset that governs political violence in Libya remains stubbornly intact, as if frozen in time. Ramadan was a journalist whose voice challenged Muammar Gaddafi’s authoritarianism from London’s airwaves, becoming a familiar presence to Arabic‑speaking audiences. Al‑Mansouri, by contrast, operated within a far more fragmented and combustible landscape: a Libya split between east and west, where rivalry is no longer ideological but existential—rooted in […]