Libya's ruling National Transitional Council said Thursday that no order had been given to kill deposed autocrat Muammar Gaddafi.
Gaddafi was killed
Thursday, succumbing to wounds sustained after fighters discovered him hiding in a sewage pipe while trying to flee his final redoubt of
Sirte.
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Gaddafi
releases defiant message from hiding Gory cell-phone footage appeared to show the fugitive strongman
being dragged through the streets of his hometown while still alive, as throngs
of Libyans beat the bloodied 69-year-old until he died.
In what appeared to contradict the events depicted in the video,the NTC said Gaddafi was killed
when a gunfight broke out after his capture between his supporters and
government fighters. He died from a bullet wound to the head, the prime
minister said.
Conflicting
reports continued to emerge Thursday night, though one chronology pieced
together from various sources suggests Gaddafi tried to break out of Sirte at
dawn in a convoy of vehicles after weeks of dogged resistance.
According
to those reports, he was stopped by a French air strike and captured, possibly
some hours later, after gun battles with rebel fighters who found him hiding in
a drainage culvert.
NATO said its warplanes fired on a convoy near Sirte
at about 8:30 a.m., striking two military vehicles in the group, but could not
confirm that Gaddafi had been a passenger.
France later said its jets had
been in action at the time.
The killing or capture of senior aides,
including possibly two sons, may ease fears of diehards regrouping elsewhere –
though the gruesome video of Gaddafi’s final moments may inflame his remaining
sympathizers.
The brief footage shows a man looking like Gaddafi, with
distinctive long, curly hair, being hauled by his hair from the hood of a truck.
The man is bloodied and staggering under blows from armed men, apparently
National Transitional Council fighters.
To the shouts of someone saying
“Keep him alive,” he disappears from view and gunshots are heard along with
chants of “Allahu akbar,” God is great.
“They captured him alive and
while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him,” said one
senior source in the NTC.
A Libyan official said Gaddafi was killed in
custody.
A spokesman for the NTC in Benghazi, Jalal al-Galal, said a
doctor who examined the fallen dictator in Misrata found he had been shot in the
head and abdomen. 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 is
Gaddafi.
Some sources said he would be buried in Misrata, most likely by
Friday, according to Muslim custom.
Other reports said he would be buried
in a secret location.
Officials said his son Mo’tassim, also seen
bleeding but alive in a video, 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 traveled around networks of NTC
fighters rejoicing in Sirte.
Two months after Western-backed rebels ended
42 years of eccentric, often bloody, one-man rule by capturing the capital
Tripoli, Gaddafi’s death and the fall of his final bastion ended a nervous
hiatus for the new interim government, which is now set to declare formal
“liberation” with a timetable for elections.
“We confirm that all the
evil [people], 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, will 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 a turn of events that few had expected so soon, since
there had been little evidence that Gaddafi himself was in Sirte.
But he
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.
NATO said it would wind
down its military mission in Libya.
In Benghazi, thousands took to the
streets, firing weapons and dancing under the old tricolor flag revived by
Gaddafi’s opponents.
In Sirte, a one-time fishing village that Gaddafi’s
grandiose schemes styled a new “capital of Africa” for the “king of kings,”
fighters whooped with delight and brandished a golden pistol they said they had
taken from him.
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 Iraq’s Hussein eight years ago,
and pleading for his life.
Libyan television carried video of two
drainage pipes, about a meter across, where it said fighters had cornered a man
who long inspired both fear and admiration around the world.
An
announcement of final liberation was expected in an address by the head of the
NTC to the nation of six million. The group faces the challenge of turning oil
wealth once monopolized by Gaddafi and his clan into a democracy, that can heal
an array of tribal and ethnic divisions he exploited.
The eight weeks
since the fall of Tripoli have tested the nerves of the motley alliance of
anti-Gaddafi forces and their Western and Arab-backers, who had begun to
question the ability of the NTC forces to root out diehard Gaddafi loyalists in
Sirte and a couple of other towns.
Gaddafi, wanted by the International
Criminal Court on charges of ordering the killing of civilians, was toppled by
rebel forces on August 23, a week short of the 42nd anniversary of the military
coup which brought him to power in 1969.
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. One NTC official on Thursday recalled an estimate that some
40,000 have died this year.
The death of Gaddafi is a setback to
campaigners seeking the full truth about the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie in
Scotland of Pan Am flight 103 which claimed 270 lives, mainly Americans, and for
which one of Gaddafi’s agents was convicted.
Jim Swire, the father of one
of the Lockerbie victims, said: “There is much still to be resolved, and we may
now have lost an opportunity for getting nearer the truth.”