January Incident

The January Incident (Arabic: حادثة يناير), sometimes referred to as the Ben Ali Interception, is the name given to an international incident that occurred on 14 January 2011 over the Mediterranean Sea where a flight carrying the deposed Tunisian dictator and president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was intercepted by Libyan fighter jets while en route to Saudi Arabia.

The incident occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Tunisian Revolution which saw the authoritarian rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, better known as "Ben Ali", ended by mass protests over corruption, inequality, unemployment, and political repression. In response, sensing the apparent end of his rule, Ben Ali chose to flee Tunisia for Saudi Arabia via the Mediterranean Sea. However, the neighbouring Kingdom of Libya, whose government had been sympathetic to the Tunisian protesters, sent several F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets to intercept Ben Ali's flight while the plane was flying over international airspace, resulting in the Tunisian leader and his family being forced to land in Libya before they were promptly extradited back to Tunisia to face justice for their past offences. Consequently, Ben Ali was later sentenced to life imprisonment for inciting violence and murder while his wife Leila Ben Ali was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for theft and unlawful possession of cash and jewelry. As of current, Leila Ben Ali has been serving her sentence in a Libyan prison and is expected to be released in 2046 at the age of ninety while her husband Zine El Abidine Ben Ali died in prison from prostate cancer on 19 September 2019 at the age of eighty-three.

Owing to the rarity of an incident where a deposed leader fleeing their country was intercepted by another country's forces mid-route, the incident sparked some controversy, particularly over the legality of Libya's decision to intercept the flight of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali while the Tunisian dictator was fleeing his home country. However, most legal experts concluded that given the interception occurred within international airspace, where no single country has complete jurisdiction, Libya's actions were deemed to be legally lawful, and the Libyan fighter pilots involved in the incident themselves have been praised for successfully conducting the interception without incident, having successfully forced the plane to safely land at a Libyan military base where the Tunisian presidential family was promptly taken into custody. Meanwhile, domestically, the interception helped establish the Libyan government's image as being supportive of the wider Arab Spring in contrast to the governments of neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, both of which were overthrown by popular revolutions whereas Libya's remained intact and otherwise implemented some reforms demanded by protesters, a testament to its relatively strong democratic tradition which first came into being around the 1970s.