SIRTE – The former dictator 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 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 yesterday 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 air strikes in a desperate bid to break out of Sirte, may ease fears of diehards regrouping elsewhere. But mobile phone video apparently of Gadafy alive and being beaten may inflame his sympathisers.
A Libyan official said the dictator (69) was killed in custody.
Nato said it would now wind down its military mission in Libya.
A spokesman for the National Transitional Council 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. Footage from Sirte showed a man looking like Gadafy, with distinctive long, curly hair, bloodied and staggering under blows from armed men, apparently council fighters.
The brief video shows him being hauled by his hair from the hood of a truck. To the shouts of someone saying, “keep him alive!” he disappears from view and gunshots are heard.
“They captured him alive and while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him,” said one senior council source.
Driven in an ambulance from Sirte, his partially stripped body was delivered to a mosque in Misrata. Senior council official Abdel Majid Mlegta said that DNA tests were being conducted to confirm it was the dictator. He would be buried in Misrata, most likely today 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 Gadafy 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 dancing under the old tricolour flag revived by Gadafy’s opponents.
Accounts were hazy of his final hours, though there was no shortage of fighters willing to claim they saw Gadafy, who had long pledged to go down fighting, pleading for his life.
One possible description, pieced together from various sources, suggests he tried to break out of his final redoubt at dawn in a convoy of vehicles after weeks of dogged resistance. However, he was stopped by a French air strike and captured, possibly some hours later, after gun battles with council fighters who found him hiding in a drainage culvert.
Nato said its warplanes fired on a convoy near Sirte striking two military vehicles in the group. But it could not confirm that Gadafy had been a passenger. France later said its jets had been in action at the time.
Libyan television carried video of two drainage pipes, about a metre across, where it said fighters had cornered a man who long inspired fear and admiration around the world.
An announcement of final liberation was expected in an address by the head of the NTC prepared to the nation of six million. They face the challenge of turning oil wealth once monopolised by Gadafy and his clan into a democracy that can heal tribal and ethnic divisions he exploited.
The eight weeks since the fall of Tripoli have tested the nerves of the motley alliance of anti-Gadafy forces and their western and Arab backers, who had begun to question the ability of council forces to root out diehard loyalists in Sirte and a couple of other towns.
Gadafy was a week short of the 42nd anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power in 1969. By averting a possible dispute in Libya and internationally about where to try him, the summary killing on a desert road may have been helpful for Libyans, some analysts said.
Hundreds of NTC troops had surrounded the Mediterranean coastal town of Sirte for weeks in a chaotic struggle that killed and wounded scores of the besieging forces and an unknown number of defenders.