Libya

Istanbul, Turkiye – Turkish authorities and Libyan officials are conducting an investigation into the crash of a private jet that killed Libya’s army chief, Mohammed Ali Ahmed al-Haddad, and seven other people near Ankara.

The probe, coordinated by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, is focusing on technical evidence, flight recordings, crew activity and aircraft maintenance, officials said. The French civil aviation investigations agency, BEA, has announced that it will participate in the probe.

General al-Haddad had been received in Ankara on Tuesday for talks with his Turkish counterpart, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu, and Defence Minister Yasar Guler.

According to officials, the French-made Dassault Falcon 50 took off from Ankara Esenboga Airport at 2:17pm on Tuesday, heading back to Libya, reported an electrical malfunction 16 minutes later and requested an emergency return.

Radar contact was lost shortly after at 2:41 pm (17:41 GMT) while the aircraft was descending towards the runway.

Officials said there was only a two-minute window between the emergency alarm and the crash.

The probe’s many factors

The forensic examination of the bodies of General al-Haddad and his military companions was completed early on Saturday and they have been repatriated to Libya after a ceremony in their honour at an airbase outside Ankara.

The site of Tuesday’s crash – near Kesikkavak village in Haymana district, roughly 70km (43 miles) south of Ankara – has been sealed off by Turkish security forces. All wreckage, including the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, or “black boxes”, has been secured and transported for analysis, according to authorities.

As part of the prosecutor-led investigation, specialists are examining air traffic control recordings, radar data and airport security camera footage.

Authorities have also requested communication logs between the pilots and the control tower and are reviewing the crew’s rest periods, medical history and records of meals or medication taken before the flight.

Maintenance logs and documentation related to the aircraft’s most recent checks are also under scrutiny to identify any possible technical lapses.

Fuel samples have been taken from both the wreckage and airport tanks to rule out contamination or incorrect fuel use, while local weather data from the time of the crash has been requested.

If evidence points to a structural failure or design flaw, investigators said, the inquiry could be expanded to include manufacturers and maintenance contractors.

International rules and reporting timeline

Gursel Tokmakoglu, former head of the Turkish air force’s intelligence agency, said the crash should be viewed as an international case, given the number of actors involved.

“The Libyan government chartered an aircraft from a foreign country. The aircraft was manufactured in another country. The pilots were from elsewhere. The passengers were Libyan, and the crash happened in Turkiye,” he said.

“If you also consider insurance companies and international aviation bodies, this is clearly a multinational incident.”

Earlier, Turkish Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu had announced that the black boxes may be sent to another country for further analysis, raising some questions about why analysis could not be done in either Turkiye or Libya.

Tokmakoglu said Turkiye could either examine the black boxes domestically or send them abroad for further analysis.

“Transferring the recorders can help ensure greater transparency and a clearer understanding of what happened, especially in a case involving so many international stakeholders,” he said.

Tokmakoglu noted that according to preliminary findings, the aircraft transmitted the 7700 emergency “squawk” code, which indicates an emergency that requires immediate attention, and the crew reported an electrical malfunction.

However, he added, it would be premature to assume that the electrical malfunction was the cause of the aircraft’s crash.

“In aviation, an electrical failure can trigger other problems,” he said, likening such a situation to “being admitted to intensive care for heart failure but dying later from a lung infection”.

Aviation industry analyst Guntay Simsek told Al Jazeera, citing his own sources, that there are no indications so far that the crash was caused by an external factor such as an explosion, adding that the technical investigation remains ongoing.

The probe starting immediately is within general best practices after a crash, aviation industry analyst Guntay Simsek said, pointing to ICAO regulations that govern aircraft accident investigations, which require a preliminary report within 30 days and a final report within 12 months.

DNA testing delays funeral plans as investigators examine the wreckage of jet crash that killed Libyan army chief.

Officials from Libya and Turkiye have stepped up coordination over the investigation into a plane crash near Ankara that killed Libya’s army chief and seven other people as forensic work and preparations for repatriating the bodies are conducted.

Libya’s Criminal Investigation Department chief, Major General Mahmoud Ashour, led a delegation to the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday as part of the joint inquiry.

The visit followed discussions with Turkish prosecutors overseeing the case.

On Tuesday, a private jet carrying Libya’s army chief of staff, Mohammed Ali Ahmed Al-Haddad, reported an electrical malfunction shortly after taking off from Ankara Esenboga Airport.

According to Turkiye’s head of communications, Burhanettin Duran, the aircraft, bound for Tripoli, requested an emergency landing 16 minutes after takeoff.

Air traffic controllers redirected the Dassault Falcon 50 back towards Ankara’s airport, but radar contact was lost three minutes later as the jet descended.

The wreckage was found near the village of Kesikkavak in Ankara’s Haymana district. Eight people, including three crew members, were killed.

Search and rescue teams reached the site after Turkiye’s Ministry of Interior launched emergency operations while multiple authorities joined the investigation into the cause of the crash.

Funeral prayers delayed

Reporting from Misrata, Libya, Al Jazeera’s Malik Traina said preparations were under way for the return of Al-Haddad’s body although the timeline remains uncertain.

“Earlier today, we spoke to the minister of communications, and we were told the funeral prayer will be held tomorrow. That’s starting to change, now they’ve been receiving phone calls from government officials saying that it could likely be postponed till Saturday,” Traina said on Thursday.

Traina said the recovery process has taken longer due to the severity of the crash, which scattered remains across a wide area and necessitated DNA testing.

“There’s a lot of pressure for that process to finish as soon as possible. Whether or not that’ll happen, we’re gonna have to wait and see.

“He really was someone who tried to build up the military institutions, especially in western Libya, a place that is divided with powerful armed groups and militias controlling vast areas of land.”

Barin Kayaoglu, of the Social Sciences University of Ankara, says that a Libyan general’s plane crash in Turkiye is unlikely to impact the broader framework of Turkiye’s role in Libya.

Fifteen years ago, a Tunisian fruit seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, despairing at official corruption and police violence, walked to the centre of his hometown of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire, and changed the region forever.

Much of the hope triggered by that act lies in ruins. The revolutions that followed in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria have cost the lives of tens and thousands before, in some cases, giving way to chaos or the return of authoritarianism.

Only Tunisia appeared to fulfil the promise of the “Arab Spring”, with voices from around the world championing its democratic success, ignoring economic and political failings through much of its post-revolutionary history that stirred discontent.

Today, many of Tunisia’s post-revolutionary gains have been cast aside in the wake of President Kais Saied’s dramatic power grab in July 2021. Labelled a coup by his opponents, it ushered in a new hardline rule in Tunisia.

Burying the hopes of the revolution

Over the following years, as well as temporarily shuttering parliament – only reopening it in March 2023 – Saied has rewritten the constitution and overseen a relentless crackdown on critics and opponents.

“They essentially came for everyone; judges, civil society members, people from all political backgrounds, especially the ones that were talking about unifying an opposition against the coup regime,” Kaouther Ferjani, whose father, 71-year-old Ennahdha leader Said Ferjani, was arrested in February 2023.

In September, Saied said his measures were a continuation of the revolution triggered by Bouzazzi’s self-immolation. Painting himself a man of the people, he railed against nameless “lobbyists and their supporters” who thwart the people’s ambitions.

However, while many Tunisians have been cowed into silence by Saied’s crackdown, they have also refused to take part in elections, now little more than a procession for the president.

In 2014, during the country’s first post-revolution presidential election, about 61 percent of the country’s voters turned out to vote.

By last year’s election, turnout had halved.

“Kais Saied’s authoritarian rule has definitively buried the hopes and aspirations of the 2011 revolution by systematically crushing fundamental rights and freedoms and putting democratic institutions under his thumb,” Bassam Khawaja, deputy director at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera English.

In the wake of the revolution, many across Tunisia became activists, seeking to involve themselves in forging what felt like a new national identity.

The number of civil society organisations exploded, with thousands forming to lobby against corruption or promote human rights, transitional justice, press freedom and women’s rights.

At the same time, political shows competed for space, debating the direction the country’s new identity would take.

“It was an amazing time,” a political analyst who witnessed the revolution and remains in Tunisia said, asking to remain anonymous. “Anybody with anything to say was saying it.

“Almost overnight, we had hundreds of political parties and thousands of civil society organisations. Many of the political parties shifted or merged… but Tunisia retained an active civil society, as well as retaining freedom of speech all the way up to 2022.”

Threatened by Saied’s Decree 54 of 2022, which criminalised any electronic communication deemed by the government as false, criticism of the ruling elite within the media and even on social networks has largely been muzzled.

“Freedom of speech was one of the few lasting benefits of the revolution,” the analyst continued.

“The economy failed to pick up, services didn’t really improve, but we had debate and freedom of speech. Now, with Decree 54, as well as commentators just being arrested for whatever reason, it’s gone.”

In 2025, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch slammed Tunisia’s crackdown on activists and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs).

In a statement before the prosecution of six NGO workers and human rights defenders working for the Tunisian Council for Refugees in late November, Amnesty pointed to the 14 Tunisian and international NGOs that had their activities suspended by court order over the previous four months.

Included were the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights, the media platform Nawaat and the Tunis branch of the World Organisation against Torture.

‘Plotting against state security’

Dozens of political figures from post-revolution governments have also been arrested, with little concern for party affiliation or ideology.

In April 2023, 84-year-old Rached Ghannouchi, leader of what had been Tunisia’s main political bloc, the Ennahdha Party, was arrested on charges of “plotting against state security”.

According to his daughter, Yusra, after a series of subsequent convictions, Ghannouchi currently faces a further 42 years in jail.

Later the same year, Ghannouchi’s principal critic, Abir Moussi, the leader of the Free Destourian Party, was jailed on a variety of charges.

Critics dismiss the charges, saying the criteria for arrest have been the person’s potential to rally opinion against Saied.

“This is not just the case for my father,” Yusra continued, referring to others, such as the leading post-coup opposition figure Jawhar Ben Mubarak.

“Other politicians, judges, journalists, and ordinary citizens … have been sentenced to very heavy sentences, without any evidence, without any respect for legal procedures, simply because Tunisia has now sadly been taken back to the very same dictatorship against which Tunisians had risen in 2010.”

Ghannouchi and Moussi, along with dozens of former elected lawmakers, remain in jail. The political parties that once vied for power in the country’s parliament are largely absent.

In their place, since Saied’s revised 2022 constitution weakened parliament, is a body that is no longer a threat to the president.

“The old parliament was incredibly fractious, and did itself few favours,” said Hatem Nafti, essayist and author of Our Friend Kais Saied, a book criticising Tunisia’s new regime. He was referring to the ammunition provided to its detractors by a chaotic and occasionally violent parliament.

“However, it was democratically elected and blocked legislation that its members felt would harm Tunisia.

“In the new parliament, members feel the need to talk tough and even be rude to ministers,” Nafti continued. “But it’s really just a performance… Nearly all the members are there because they agree with Kais Saied.”

Hopes that the justice system might act as a check on Saied have faltered. The president has continued to remodel the judiciary to a design of his own making, including by sacking 57 judges for not delivering verdicts he wanted in 2022.

By the 2024 elections, that effort appeared complete, with the judicial opposition to his rule that remained, in the shape of the administrative court, rendered subservient to his personally appointed electoral authority, and the most serious rivals for the presidency jailed.

“The judiciary is now almost entirely under the government’s control,“ Nafti continued. “Even under [deposed President Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali you had the CSM [Supreme Judicial Council], which oversaw judges’ appointments, promotions, and disciplinary matters.

“Now that only exists on paper, with the minister of justice able to determine precisely what judges go where and what judgements they’ll deliver.”

Citing what he said is the “shameful silence of the international community that once supported the country’s democratic transition”, Khawaja said: ”Saied has returned Tunisia to authoritarian rule.”