The Saudi news channel Al-Hadath reported on Sunday that Muammar Gaddafi's son, Hannibal, was transferred to a hospital in Lebanon, "and his health condition is critical."

The channel quoted unidentified sources as saying that Hannibal, who is on hunger strike, "suffered from a sharp drop in blood sugar and his health condition is critical."

This would be the second time that Hannibal Gaddafi was transferred to a hospital since June 22. He began a hunger strike on June 3 to protest his detention in Lebanon without a trial since 2015, when he was kidnapped from neighboring Syria, where he had been living as a political refugee.

He was abducted by Lebanese militants demanding information on the whereabouts of prominent Lebanese Shiite cleric Musa al-Sadr, who went missing in Libya 45 years ago.

Lebanese police later announced it had collected Hannibal from the northeastern city of Baalbek where he was being held. He has been detained in a Beirut jail without trial since then.

The disappearance of al-Sadr in 1978 has been a long-standing sore point in Lebanon. The cleric’s family believes he may still be alive in a Libyan prison, though most Lebanese presume al-Sadr is dead. He would be 94 years old.

Al-Sadr was the founder of the Amal group, Arabic for “hope,” and an acronym for the militia’s Arabic name, the Lebanese Resistance Brigades. The group later fought in Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war. 

Lebanon’s powerful Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri heads the group.

Most of al-Sadr’s followers are convinced that Muammar Gaddafi ordered al-Sadr killed in a dispute over Libyan payments to Lebanese militias. Libya has maintained that the cleric and his two traveling companions left Tripoli in 1978 on a flight to Rome and suggested he was a victim of a power struggle among Shiites.

Hannibal Gaddafi was born two years before al-Sadr disappeared.