No sign of foul play surrounding death of Gaddafi oil chief

Libya’s Gaddafi-era prime minister and oil chief Shokri Ghanem died after suffering heart failure and falling into the Danube river and there is no sign of foul play, the Vienna prosecutor’s office has said.

The mysterious death in late April shocked Mr Ghanem’s friends and colleagues, who at the time said they suspected enemies may have hunted down and killed the man who knew more than anyone else about the toppled Libyan dictator’s ­billions.

But a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in the Austrian capital yesterday said he “definitely” did not see any suspicion that the 69-year-old had been murdered.

“There is no hint, no clue, that anything happened before he fell into the water,” spokesman Thomas Vecsey said referring to an examination by experts at ­Vienna university.

Mr Ghanem’s body was found floating a few hundred metres from his home, fully clothed, near a promenade lined with bars and restaurants, where the Viennese gather in the summer to sunbathe and drink beer. Police said he had been in the water a few hours, since about dawn on 29 April.

There is no rail along the water’s edge in that area, and it was not the first time a dead body had been found floating there.

Mr Vecsey said the experts had concluded that Mr Ghanem had very likely suffered heart failure and then fallen into the river. He said: “He died of the heart attack but at the same time swallowed water.

“The clothes were intact so there was no fight before, nothing that could lead us to the thought that there was somebody else involved.”

He added that blood tests had only revealed normal levels of caffeine and nicotine.

Algae found in the corpse showed that Mr Ghanem gasped twice for air before drowning, Austria’s Kurier newspaper 
reported.