CAIRO — A prominent Libyan activist who had become an international face of her strife-torn country’s efforts to build a democracy was assassinated by gunmen who stormed her home in the restive eastern city of Benghazi shortly after she cast her ballot in the country’s parliamentary elections, police said Thursday.
The slaying of Salwa Bugaighis stunned residents of her home city, politicians, activists, and diplomats, among whom she was well known. International rights groups called on authorities to investigate, something many Libyans believe won’t be possible amid widespread fear of militias.
Bugaighis, a lawyer and rights activist, was at the forefront in the 2011 uprising against dictator Moammar Khadafy. After his ouster, she became one of the most outspoken voices against militiamen and Islamist extremists who have run rampant in the country.
The identity of the gunmen was not immediately known. Islamist radical militias, however, have been blamed for frequent assassinations of secular activists, judges, moderate clerics, policemen, and soldiers in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city.
Bugaighis was shot in the head and stabbed multiple times on Wednesday night, just hours after casting her ballot, police spokesman Ibrahim al-Sharaa said. She was rushed to a hospital, where she died, he said.
Her husband, a member of the Benghazi municipal council and at home at the time, has disappeared since the attack and is believed to have been abducted, Sharaa said.
Earlier in the day, Bugaighis had been speaking by phone from her home on a Libyan TV channel about fighting raging near her neighborhood, sparked when militants attacked army troops deploying to protect polling stations.
On her Facebook page, she posted a photo taken out her window showing what appeared to be militants in fatigues with a black banner just outside her house.
‘‘These are people who want to foil elections,’’ she told Al-Nabaa network as rattling gunfire interrupted her call. ‘‘Benghazi has been always defiant, and always will be despite the pain and fear. It will succeed.’’
In the evening, five gunmen broke into her home, the house’s guard told police, according to Sharaa. They first asked about her son, Wael, then shot the guard in the leg and broke into the house. The guard said he heard gunfire inside.
Bugaighis’s house is located in an area where two powerful Islamist militias are operating — Rafallah Sahati and Ansar al-Shariah, according to Sharaa. The latter is a prime suspect in the Sept 11, 2012, attack on a US diplomatic facility in Benghazi that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.
Bugaighis had just come to Benghazi from the capital, Tripoli, to cast her ballot, Hanaa Mohammed, a family friend, told Libya Ahrar TV. She had fled to Jordan with her family some time back because of death threats against them. Her son survived an abduction attempt earlier in the year.
More recently, she and her husband came back and were staying in Tripoli, though their two children remained in Jordan, a family friend said.
Hours after her killing, the headquarters of a 60-member panel tasked to draft the constitution came under attack by a car bomb in the eastern city of al-Baida, Sharaa said. No one was killed in the attack, but the historic building used under the monarchy as Parliament’s headquarters suffered damage.
In Washington, National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice called the assassination ‘‘brutal and senseless.’’ She said that she met Bugaighis in November 2011, soon after Khadafy’s fall.
Human Rights Watch paid tribute to Bugaighis and said that with her killing, ‘‘the original idealism of the 2011 uprising that overthrew Khadafy’s tyranny has received another crushing blow, and many Libyan women have lost a role model.’’