What was meant to be a routine flight home ended in tragedy.
Libya’s army chief, Gen Mohammed Ali Ahmed al-Haddad, has been killed in a plane crash in Turkey.
It is an abrupt and shocking loss for a country already used to instability.
The Falcon 50 jet took off from Ankara on Tuesday evening, bound for Tripoli. Less than an hour later, contact was gone.
Turkish officials say the aircraft issued an emergency landing request before disappearing from radar.
Wreckage was later found southwest of the capital. Eight people died, including senior Libyan military officials and crew.
Just hours earlier, Gen Haddad had been in talks with Turkey’s defence minister.
Crash Probed
The mission? Deepening military and security cooperation between the two countries.
“Libya has lost men who served their country with sincerity and dedication,” Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh said, calling it a “great loss”.
Investigators are now combing through the crash site, with the black box and voice recorder recovered.
What went wrong in those final minutes remains unclear.
Turkey has become a key power broker in Libya since 2019, backing Tripoli’s UN-recognised government against eastern rival forces.
In a nation still fractured after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the timing of this loss raises an uneasy question.
In a country shaped by chaos, can anything—even tragedy—come at a stable moment?
