[5] An arrest warrant was issued for him on 27 June 2011 by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for charges of crimes against humanity against the Libyan people, for killing and persecuting civilians,[6] under Articles 7(1)(a) and 7(1)(h) of the Rome statute.

[17][18] After several countries, including France and Canada, refused to grant him a student visa, Saif earned an MBA from the Imadec business school in Vienna, where he became friends with OPEC official Shukri Ghanem and Austrian far-right politician Jörg Haider.

The lawsuit was settled after the intervention of Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud with The Sunday Telegraph agreeing to publish an apology and pay a portion of Saif's legal costs.

[30][31] Alongside accusations of plagiarism, allegations abound that Saif's thesis was in many parts ghost-written by consultants from Monitor Group, which earned $3 million per year in fees from Muammar Gaddafi.

[41] In December 2010, Gaddafi announced that his charity foundation "will no longer be involved in promoting human rights and political change in the North African country," and that instead, it "will focus on its 'core charitable mission' of delivering aid and relief to sub-Saharan Africa.

"During this time we saw Gaddafi's son on a television broadcast categorically denying that Libya still tortured suspected criminals", claimed Valya Chervianashka, one of the accused nurses in her autobiography.

We didn't realise it then, but this Libyan man would indeed help us in the future.Saif introduced the Isratine proposal to permanently resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through a secular, federalist, republican, binational one-state solution.

[49] In an August 2008 BBC TV interview, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said that Libya had admitted responsibility (but not "guilt") for the Lockerbie bombing simply to get trade sanctions removed.

"[56] In 2009, Saif al-Islam welcomed Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division, into Libya, accompanying her in meeting with many government officials and others during her visit.

She wrote of her official visit that "the real impetus for the transformation rests squarely with a quasi-governmental organization, the Qaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development" chaired by Gaddafi.

Because of a US legal embargo, Libya cannot purchase weapons from the United States, Sweden, or Germany, and has been disallowed from buying "Tiger" vehicles with American-manufactured engines from Jordan.

Gaddafi held a standoff with US officials in November 2009, refusing to send a shipment of Highly Enriched Uranium back to Russia unless the United States renewed its commitment to cooperation with Libya.

[59] On 19 February, several days after the Arab Spring came to Libya, Saif al-Islam announced the creation of a commission of inquiry into the violence, chaired by a Libyan judge, as reported on state television.

"[62] Speaking on Libyan state TV, Saif al-Islam blamed the civil war on tribal factions and Islamists acting on their own agendas, drunken and drugged.

[70] On 27 April 2011, Saif al-Islam came to an agreement with Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and senior NTC figure Ali Zeidan to end the war, but the deal was vetoed by Britain and France.

[79] On 3 August 2011, Saif al-Islam gave an interview to the New York Times stating that Libya was becoming more closely aligned to Islamists and would likely resemble Iran or Saudi Arabia.

[86] On 5 September, another brother, Saadi, said in an interview with CNN that an "aggressive" speech by Saif al-Islam had led to the breakdown of the negotiations between NTC forces and Gaddafi loyalists in Bani Walid.

He appeared on Syrian pro-Gaddafi television on 22 October claiming "I am in Libya, I am alive and free and willing to fight to the end and take revenge",[91] but his whereabouts were unknown and subject to many rumors.

He was operated on by Andrei Murakhovsky, a Ukrainian doctor working in Zintan, who disputed the rumor that Saif's fingers had been cut off and claimed that his injuries were consistent with "some kind of explosion."

[114][115][116] In July 2016, one of his lawyers, Karim Khan, claimed that his client had been freed on 12 April of that year and transferred to a secret location after the government quashed his sentence, and that he would petition the ICC to drop all charges against him.

[127] On 17 February 2018, on the seventh anniversary of the outbreak of the First Libyan Civil War, Asharq Al-Awsat reported from tribal sources that several international parties were prodding extremists linked to al-Qaeda to assassinate Saif al-Islam.

[139] On 11 June 2021, The Times spoke exclusively with political representatives of Saif, who revealed that he was planning to make a return to public life, including possibly running for president, and had been courting foreign diplomats to re-establish his viability.

He said that many "ideas gaining popularity in the West, such as frequent public referendums, employee stock-ownership programs and the dangers of boxing and wrestling", echoed the words of his father's book.

[147] On 16 November, Libya's High National Election Commission rejected Gaddafi's candidacy on grounds that under Libyan law, his criminal convictions disqualified him from holding a political office.

[154] On 29 January 2022, through a statement published by his lawyer Khalid al-Zaidi, Gaddafi proposed an initiative to resolve the political crisis that began after presidential elections scheduled for December 2021 were delayed.

In the second proposal, Saif recommended that all current political figures, including himself,[156] should collectively withdraw from the electoral process in order to make way for new faces chosen by the Libyan people through transparent elections.

[163] In May 2019, two Russians affiliated with Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, Maxim Shugaley and Samer Hasan Ali Sueyfan, were arrested in Tripoli for conspiring with Saif al-Islam.

[170] In March 2023, Al-Jazeera revealed the testimonies of Wagner operative Maxim Shugaley, who alleged that Saif had given Russia incriminating evidence that implicated prominent politicians in France, the US, and Ukraine.

[178][179] At the time, Weinerman publicly denied having any contact with Saif al-Islam, but she has since admitted it, and in September 2012, she asked former British prime minister Tony Blair to intervene in his trial in order to spare his life.

[193] Through the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation (GICDF), Saif pledged a donation of £1.5 million to support the work of the LSE's Centre for the Study of Global Governance on civil society organisations in North Africa.