a former aide to Moammar Qadhdhafi said last Wednesday.
Sadr was born in Qom and reared in Iran but made his name as the leader of Lebanon’s downtrodden Shias. He vanished during a trip to Libya aimed at negotiating an end to Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.
Ahmed Ramadan, one of the most influential people in Qadhdhafi’s entourage, told Al-Aan television Sadr was likely killed just after a meeting with the Libyan dictator days after arriving in Tripoli in 1978.
“I bear witness that [Sadr] came,… he arrived in Libya,” Ramadan said on the Dubai-based channel, adding the meeting had lasted for two and a half hours.
Two Libyan officials then “took the guests” away and “100 percent, what we heard is that he was liquidated,” said Ramadan.
Ramadan said it was “possible” that Qadhdhafi had given the orders for Sadr to be killed because after the meeting, “He said: ‘Take him’.”
Ramadan said he received the information from “some sources at the time” as well as from one of the three officials involved who had since died, and that his statements could be corroborated by “complete files.”
Officially invited to Libya, Sadr arrived there August 25, 1978, with two companions, Shaikh Mohammed Yacoub and journalist Abbas Badreddin. They were seen for the last time August 31, 1978.
Sadr’s disappearance has been a source of friction between Lebanon and Libya and between Iran and Libya. Libya always maintained that the cleric had left Libya for Italy, but Italy said he never deplaned there.
Iran has been insisting in recent weeks that the new government in Libya make resolving Sadr’s case a high priority. Iran has also insisted over the decades that Sadr was alive and imprisoned in Libya.
According to an indictment against Qadhdhafi issued by Lebanon, Qadhdhafi ordered Sadr “taken away” after the pair got into a heated argument.
Abdel Moneim al-Honi, a former colonel who took part in the 1969 coup that brought Qadhdhafi to power, said in February that Qadhdhafi had ordered Sadr killed and that the cleric was buried in the southern region of Sabha.
Sadr came from a prominent family of Lebanese theologians. He was born in Qom where his father was studying and grew up with Farsi as his first language. He spoke Arabic with a prominent accent that has often been imitated in Lebanon as a sign of learning. He was educated entirely in Iran and had a degree from the University of Tehran. In 1960, at the age of 32, he accepted an invitation to return to a mosque in the family home town of Tyre.
He was a moderate who pursued working relationships with Christians, Sunnis and Druze in Lebanon, while insisting that the Maronite powers had to do more for the repressed Shias. He opposed Israel, but condemned the Palestine Liberation Organization for endangering Lebanese lives by launching attacks on Israel from Lebanon.