On 5 August, the head of the Tripoli Security Directorate, Khalil Wahiba, confirmed the launch of a comprehensive plan to secure all petrol stations in Tripoli and its suburbs. The plan reportedly includes the participation of the various security agencies of the Ministry of Interior (MoI), with the aim of protecting the petrol stations and ensuring the delivery of fuel to citizens without obstacles.
The same day, the Attorney General (AG) Sadiq al-Sour met with the head of Libya’s fuel distribution companies, including the Brega leadership, and various high-ranking figures at the NOC to determine the local market’s fuel needs. Distribution companies were required to ensure that their distribution tools comply with contractual regulations and fulfill their obligation to make the fuel delivered to consumers available at the times they deem appropriate, without any undue control resulting from dissatisfaction with the quotas allocated to these tools. Al-Sour took the chance to emphasise the importance of the preventive action against smuggling activities.
On 9 August, the AG’s Office announced the arrest of suspected fuel smugglers in Misrata and Khoms and said it had shut down several fuel depots involved in illegal smuggling. The AG said it seized ‘thousands of litres’ of fuel from these depots that it deemed were prepared for smuggling, as well as a number of fuel trucks. The AG said that its investigation discovered that the fuel being smuggled had been received by some legal distribution agencies and commercial entities (e.g. private petrol station chains) as part of their duty to enable citizens to access fuel – in other words, they had received it legally but were then smuggling it. The AG said that the judicial police would question the leaders of the arrest groups.
Over the following days, the AG’s office announced a flurry of investigations into fuel smuggling in the western region, providing specific details on several cases.
This included investigations into several specific petrol stations which had received fuel from the one of the four public distribution companies but had then not provided it for residents to access. In one case, the AG said on inspection of a petrol station in Misrata it found petrol in storage containers waiting to be diverted to smuggling networks. In Qasr Bin Ghashir, the manager of a petrol station was arrested after he had deprived residents of 60,000 litres of petrol which he had received from the International Trust Company to sell to residents.
The AG’s Office also investigated companies and industry bodies. It announced it had initiated a lawsuit against the head of the Baker’s union in Zliten due to evidence of fuel smuggling and had ordered his pre-trial detention. It said that an investigation had revealed that the official received 8.549 million litres of diesel to meet the needs of bakeries from April 2024 to July 2025, but that he had disposed of half of the aforementioned quantity for the benefit of groups engaged in fuel smuggling.
In Zuwara, the AG’s Office closed a solvent manufacturing company which had received 830,000 litres of petrol and 110,000 litres of diesel between January 2024 and July 2025, despite the company not engaging in industrial activity that authorized it to receive this quantity of fuel.