Muammar Gaddafi has been killed by Libyans he once scorned as “rats”, succumbing to wounds, some seemingly inflicted after his capture, in his hometown of Sirte on the Mediterranean.
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 Gaddafi’s senior aides, including possibly two of his sons, as an armoured convoy braved NATO air strikes in a desperate bid to break out of Sirte, might ease fears of diehards regrouping elsewhere.
However, mobile phone video apparently of Gaddafi alive and being beaten might 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,” Mr 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.
Shot in head
A spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi, Jalal al-Galal, said a doctor who examined Gaddafi 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, bloodied 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.”
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 Mutasin, also seen bleeding but alive in a video, had also died. Another son, heir-apparent Seif al-Islam, was variously reported to have surrounded, been 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, firing their weapons and dancing under the old tricolour flag revived by Gaddafi’s opponents.
Mansour el Ferjani, 49, a Benghazi bank clerk and father of five posed for a photograph holding a Kalashnikov rifle. “Don’t think I will give this gun to my son,” he said. “Now that the war is over we must give up our weapons and the children must go to school.
“But Gaddafi was a terrible dictator and this was the only way to get rid of him. We want everything people have in free countries – we want people to live in peace as you do across the Mediterranean where life doesn’t require the machinegun.”
In Sirte, a one-time fishing village and Gaddafi’s home town in which grandiose schemes had styled a new “capital of Africa” for the “king of kings”, fighters whooped with delight and some brandished a golden pistol they said they had taken from Gaddafi.
Accounts were hazy of his final hours, though there was no shortage of fighters willing to claim they saw Gaddafi, who had long pledged to go down fighting, cringing underground, like Saddam Hussein eight years ago, and pleading for his life.
Photo: Reuters