Mohamed Yousef el-Magariaf, a former Libyan ambassador to
India, founded the NFSL on 7 October 1981, at a
press conference held in
Khartoum,
Sudan. On 17 April 1984, the NFSL organised a demonstration of Libyan dissidents outside the Libyan embassy in
London. During the demonstration, shots were fired from the embassy into the group of protestors, striking eleven people, including one of the
police officers controlling the demonstration,
Yvonne Fletcher, who died shortly afterward. Fletcher's murder quickly led to the severing of diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya.
Military action Three weeks after the embassy protest, on 8 May 1984, NFSL commandos took part in an attack on Gaddafi's
Bab al-Azizia compound in
Tripoli, in an attempt to assassinate the Libyan leader. The attack was thwarted when the group's leader, Ahmed Ibrahim Ihwas, was captured when trying to enter Libya at the
Tunisian border. Although the coup attempt failed and Gaddafi escaped unscathed, dissident groups claimed that some eighty Libyans,
Cubans, and
East Germans had been killed in the operation. Some 2,000 people were arrested in Libya following the attack, and eight were hanged publicly. As part of the investigation into the bombing of
UTC Flight 772, Libyan intelligence claimed to have thwarted an attempted bombing campaign within Libya by the NFSL sometime in 1987. A Tunisian national was allegedly arrested in Tripoli in possession of a suitcase bomb similar to that used to destroy the UTC flight two years later. NFSL continued its efforts to topple Gaddafi and formed the Libyan National Army (LNA), after a group of soldiers, taken prisoner by
Chad during the
Chadian–Libyan conflict, defected from the Libyan Army and joined the NFSL in 1987. The LNA was later evacuated from Chad after the President
Hissène Habré was
overthrown by one of his former officers,
Idriss Déby, who was backed by Gaddafi. The NFSL had previously acted as a conduit between the
Habré government and that of
Saddam Hussain, who provided the Chadian military with arms captured from Iran during the then ongoing
conflict.
Political opposition Having apparently given up the idea of a military takeover, the NFSL continued its opposition to Gaddafi by media campaigns and forming political alliances with other opposition groups. The NFSL was one of seven other Libyan opposition groups that formed the
National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO) which was founded in June 2005 at the first NCLO conference in London. The NFSL and three other organizations withdrew from this alliance in February 2008 citing differences of opinion. In a statement issued by the NFSL on 28 February 2008, the NFSL announced its withdrawal from the NCLO due to what it called "straying away from the 'National Accord of 2005'". The NFSL continued its media campaigns, primarily utilizing online mediums. Though relatively weaker than before, and without a clear method of carrying out its objective of toppling the Gaddafi regime, the NFSL continued to be recognized as the leading opposition movement to Col. Gaddafi's rule of Libya. After the 2011
Libyan Civil War, the group's leaders were allowed to return to Libya. However, with the fall of the Gaddafi regime the NFSL lost its raison d'être, and thus it dissolved itself on 9 May 2012 and was replaced by the
National Front Party, which won 3 seats in the
General National Congress election, Libya's first free election in more than 40 years. ==Organization==