Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Libyans he once scorned as “rats”, succumbing to wounds, some seemingly inflicted after his capture by fighters who overran his last redoubt on Thursday in his hometown of Sirte.
Two months after Western-backed rebels ended 42 years of eccentric, often bloody, one-man rule by capturing the capital Tripoli, his death and the fall of the final bastion ended a nervous hiatus for the new interim government, which is now set to declare formal “liberation” with a timetable for elections.
The killing or capture of senior aides, including possibly two sons, as an armoured convoy braved Nato airstrikes in a desperate bid to break out of Sirte, may ease fears of diehards regrouping elsewhere — though cellphone video apparently of Gaddafi alive and being beaten may inflame his sympathisers.
A Libyan official said Gaddafi, 69, was killed in custody. “We confirm that all the evils, plus Gaddafi, have vanished from this beloved country,” interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in Tripoli as the body was delivered, a prize of war, to Misrata, the city whose siege and suffering at the hands of Gaddafi’s forces made it a symbol of the rebel cause. “It’s time to start a new Libya, a united Libya,” Jibril added. “One people, one future.” A formal declaration of liberation, that will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made by Friday, he said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who spearheaded a Franco-British move in Nato to back the revolt against Gaddafi, hailed the turn of events but also alluded to fears that, without the glue of hatred for Gaddafi, the new Libya could descend, like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, into bloody factionalism: “The liberation of Sirte must signal ... the start of a process ... to establish a democratic system in which all groups in the country have their place and where fundamental freedoms are guaranteed,” he said.
A spokesman for the NTC in Benghazi, Jalal al-Galal, said a doctor who examined the fallen strongman in Misrata found he had been shot in the head and abdomen. Jerky video shown on Al Jazeera showed a man looking like Gaddafi, with distinctive long, curly hair, blooded and staggering under blows from armed men, apparently NTC fighters. “They captured him alive and while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed,” one senior source in the NTC told Reuters. “He might have been resisting.”
Footage aired on Arab TV networks showed Gaddafi was captured wounded but alive in Sirte. The goateed, balding Gadhafi is seen in a blood-soaked shirt, and his face bloodied. Standing upright, he is shoved along by a crowd of fighters on a Sirte roadside, chanting “God is great.” Gaddafi appears to struggle against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters push him onto the hood of a pickup truck. “We want him alive. We want him alive,” one man shouts before Gaddafi is dragged away, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance. Later footage showed fighters rolling Gaddafi’s lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head.
Driven in an ambulance from Sirte, his partially stripped body was delivered to a mosque in Misrata. Senior NTC official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters that DNA tests were being conducted to confirm it was Gaddafi. He would be buried in Misrata, most likely by Friday according to Muslim custom.
Officials said his son Mo’tassim, also seen bleeding but alive in a video, had also died. Another son, heir-apparent Saif al-Islam, was variously reported to be surrounded, captured or killed as conflicting accounts of the day’s events crackled around networks of NTC fighters rejoicing in Sirte.
In Benghazi, where in February Gaddafi disdainfully said he would hunt down the “rats” who had emulated their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbours by rising up against an unloved autocrat, thousands took to the streets, loosing off weapons and dancing under the old tricolour flag revived by Gaddafi’s opponents.
— Reuters,AP