What happened to more than 27 tonnes of gold that allegedly disappeared when the Gaddafi regime fell last year?

A report in Lebanon’s Ad-Diar newspaper claims to quote Abdullah Senussi, the former head of intelligence under Muammar Gaddafi, as saying that “huge quantities” of the precious metal are buried in a secret location in the Libyan desert.

It asserts that Senussi, who was extradited from Mauritania to Libya in early September and is currently being held in Tripoli, does not know the location of the gold. The secret, according to the report, is known only by a “small group of army officers” and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the former leader’s son who has been imprisoned in the town of Zintan since November last year.

The reports are predictably lacking in hard facts, and sound suspiciously like the plot of a film, but could there be any truth in the tale?

Under Gaddafi, Libya sat on a disproportionately large quantity of gold reserves compared to the size of its economy – prior to 2011 it was officially in the top 25 gold-holding countries in the world – and IMF data indicate that its reserves did indeed fall suddenly around the time that the Gaddafi regime fell last year.

The figures show that holdings dropped from 143.8 tonnes in the third quarter of 2011 to 116.6 tonnes by the end of the year.

Those 27.2 tonnes would have been worth around $1.6bn in September 2011, which, ironically, coincided with an all-time high in world gold prices of about $1,900 per ounce.

So what happened to the missing stash? There are various possibilities.

Shortly after the fall of Tripoli in August last year, interim Central Bank governor Qassim Azzuz claimed that the Gaddafi regime - besieged by international sanctions and desperately needing cash to fund its fight against the uprising - had sold 29 tonnes of gold to unspecified "private traders" in April.  

Another theory says that it may have been transferred to Sirte or Sebha, before being shipped in early September 2011 through southern Libya in a 200-car armoured convoy that crossed into Niger.

Whatever the truth, the episode is one of several still-unresolved mysteries from the Gaddafi era.