WORLD_ WHO KILLED GADDAFI?

WHO KILLED GADDAFI?


•Who killed Gaddafi?
The exact circumstances of Gaddafi's death are unclear but the footage of the last moments has offered some clues.

Yahoo!7 and Agencies
October 21, 2011, 4:02 pm


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SIRTE, Libya (Reuters) - Disturbing images of a blood-stained and shaken Muammar Gaddafi being dragged around by angry fighters quickly circulated around the world after the Libyan dictator's dramatic death near his home town of Sirte.

The exact circumstances of his demise are still unclear with conflicting accounts of his death. But the footage of the last chaotic moments of Gaddafi's life offered some clues into what happened.

Gaddafi was still alive when he was captured near Sirte. In the video, filmed by a bystander in the crowd and later aired on television, Gaddafi is shown dazed and wounded being dragged off a vehicle's bonnet and pulled to the ground by his hair.

"Keep him alive, keep him alive!" someone shouts. Gaddafi then goes out of view and gunshots ring out.

"They captured him alive and while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him," one senior source in the NTC told Reuters. "He might have been resisting."

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In what appeared to contradict the events depicted in the video, Libya's ruling National Transitional Council 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.

The NTC said no order had been given to kill him.

Gaddafi called the rebels who rose up against his 42 years of one-man rule "rats," but in the end it appeared that it was he who was captured cowering in a drainage pipe full of rubbish and filth.

"He called us rats, but look where we found him," said Ahmed Al Sahati, a 27-year-old government fighter, standing next to two stinking drainage pipes under a six-lane highway near Sirte.

On the ground, government fighters described scenes of carnage as they told stories of Gaddafi's final hours.

Shortly before dawn prayers, Gaddafi, surrounded by a few dozen loyal bodyguards and accompanied by the head of his now non-existent army Abu Bakr Younis Jabr, broke out of the two-month siege of Sirte and made a break for the west.

They did not get far.


Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, covered in blood, is pulled from a truck by NTC fighters in Sirte. Click for more photos. WARNING: Graphic content. Photos: Reuters

France said its aircraft struck military vehicles belonging to Gaddafi forces near Sirte at about 8:30 a.m. (0630 GMT), but said it was unsure whether the strikes had killed Gaddafi.

A NATO official said the convoy was hit either by a French plane or a U.S. Predator drone.

Two miles (3 km) west of Sirte, 15 pick-up trucks mounted with machine guns lay burnt out, smashed and smouldering next to an electricity substation 20 metres from the main road.

They had clearly been hit by a force far beyond anything the motley army the former rebels has assembled during eight months of revolt to overthrow the once feared leader.

There was no bomb crater, indicating the strike may have been carried out by a jet fighter.

Inside the trucks still in their seats sat the charred skeletal remains of drivers and passengers killed instantly by the strike. Other bodies lay mutilated and contorted strewn across the grass. Some 50 bodies in all.

Mansour Daou, leader of Gaddafi's personal bodyguards, was with the former strongman shortly before his end. He told al Arabiya television that after the air strike the survivors had "split into groups and each group went its own way."

"I was with Gaddafi and Abu Bakr Younis Jabr and about four volunteer soldiers." Daou said he had not witnessed his leader's death because he had fallen unconscious after being wounded in the back by a shell explosion.


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The future for Libya

Muammar Gaddafi’s bloodied, half naked body with trademark long curls hanging limp around a rarely seen bald spot, was delivered, a prize of war, to Misrata, the city west of Sirte whose siege and months of suffering at the hands of Gaddafi's artillery and snipers made it a symbol of the rebel cause.

A quick and secret burial was due later on Friday.

"It's time to start a new Libya, a united Libya," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril declared. "One people, one future."

A formal announcement of Libya's liberation, which will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made on Saturday, Libyan officials said.

Two months after Western-backed rebels ended 42 years of eccentric one-man rule by capturing the capital Tripoli, his death ended a nervous hiatus for the new interim government.

U.S. President Barack Obama, in a veiled dig at the Syrian and other leaders resisting the democrats of the Arab Spring, declared "the rule of an iron fist inevitably comes to an end."

But Gaddafi's death 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."


An anti-Gaddafi fighter shows the media what they say was the golden pistol of Muammar Gaddafi, near Sirte October 20, 2011. Photo: Reuters


Gaddafi killed, rebels rejoice

The demise of the hated dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled his oil-rich North African nation with an iron rod for close on 42 years, sparked a spontaneous outpouring of joy and celebratory gunfire in streets across Libya.

"We announce to the world that Gaddafi has died in the custody of the revolution," National Transitional Council (NTC) spokesman Abdel Hafez Ghoga said in the eastern city of Benghazi.

"It is an historic moment. It is the end of tyranny and dictatorship. Gaddafi has met his fate," he added.

In Tripoli, interim premier Mahmud Jibril said NTC leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil was to declare by Friday that the country has been liberated, paving the way for the formation of an interim government ahead of elections.

As Libyans danced for joy in the streets, world leaders welcomed Gaddafi's demise as the end of despotism, tyranny, dictatorship and ultimately war in Libya.

Colonel Kadhafi, whose whereabouts were unknown since NTC fighters overran the capital in August, was captured in a sewage pipe waving a golden gun near Sirte, Libyan fighters said.

"Gaddafi was in a jeep when rebels opened fire on it. He got out and tried to flee, taking shelter in a sewage pipe," an NTC field commander, Mohammed Leith, told AFP.

NTC fighters "opened fire again and he came out carrying a Kalashnikov (assault rifle) in one hand and a pistol in the other," he said.


New-regime fighters celebrate Gaddafi's death. Photos: Reuters

Gaddafi "looked left and right and asked what was happening. Rebels opened fire again, wounding his leg and shoulder. He died after that," according to Leith.

But according to Jibril, Gaddafi was shot in the head "in crossfire" between his supporters and new regime fighters after his capture.

"When he was found, he was in good health, carrying a gun," Jibril told a press conference in Tripoli. Kadhafi was transferred from the sewage pipe to a pickup truck, at which point he was shot in the right hand.

"When the vehicle started moving, it was caught in crossfire between Gaddafi fighters and the revolutionaries, and he was shot in the head," according to Jibril.

"He was alive up to last moment, until he arrived at hospital" in the town of Misrata.

French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet revealed that a French Mirage-2000 fired a warning shot at a column of up to 80 vehicles trying to flee Sirte early Thursday.

Libyan fighters then intervened, destroying the vehicles, from which "they took out Colonel Gaddafi," he added.

Longuet told reporters in Paris that the convoy "was stopped from progressing as it sought to flee Sirte but was not destroyed by the French intervention."

A videotape aired on Arab satellite channels showed a bloodied Gaddafi alive and walking as he was being manhandled by Libya's new regime fighters after his capture.

NTC fighters circled the 69-year-old ousted strongman, who was bloodied in the head, face and shoulders, as he apparently tried to cry out.


Graffiti is seen on a wall mocking disposed leader Muammar Gaddafi in Benghazi, Libya. Source: Getty

Leith, the NTC commander, said one of Gaddafi's sons, Mutassim, was also killed in Sirte. "We found him dead. We put his body and that of (ex-defence minister) Abu Bakr Yunis Jabar in an ambulance to take them to Misrata."

The NTC's Jibril said that Gaddafi's most prominent son and one-time heir apparent, Seif al-Islam, was believed to be pinned down in a village near Sirte.

Witnesses said they saw the bodies of both Gaddafi and Mutassim in Misrata late on Thursday. "I saw his body, he had a wound on his head," said one witness, Hakim al-Farjani.

"There was a lot of blood on his body. He had a bandage on his stomach," he said. "The body came in an ambulance. Then the crowd became bigger and bigger so they took the body away."

An AFP photographer also saw Mutassim's body after it had been transferred to Misrata.

News of Gaddafi's death came as new regime troops overran the last redoubt of his loyalists in Sirte, bringing to an end a two-month siege.

Fighters moving in from east and west overcame the last resistance in the city's Number Two residential neighbourhood where his diehard supporters had been holed up.

"Sirte has been liberated, and with the confirmation that Gaddafi is dead," Libya has been completely liberated, a top NTC military official, Khalifa Haftar, told AFP in Tripoli.

Fighters who had fought in the bloody eight-month conflict that toppled the despot at a cost of more than 25,000 lives, erupted in jubilation, firing volleys of gunfire into the sky and chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest).

Pick-up trucks blaring out patriotic music criss-crossed the streets of Sirte as fighters flashed V for victory signs and chanted "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest).

"We did it! We did it!" chanted the fighters overcome with emotion, exchanging well-wishes, hugs and handshakes against a backdrop of intense celebratory gunfire.


World leaders react

World leaders began to weigh in on the death of the man who had ruled the oil-rich nation.

US President Barack Obama said Gaddafi's death ended a long, painful chapter for Libyans and warned "iron fist" regimes in the rest of the Arab world they would inevitably fall.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Obama said Gaddafi's demise vindicated the collective military action of the West and said Libyans now had a chance to build a "democratic" and


"tolerant nation."

British Prime Minister David Cameron said the death was an occasion to remember his victims, while hailing it as a chance for a "democratic future" for Libya.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy also hailed the end of Gaddafi and urged the country's new regime to pursue democratic reforms.

French and British forces spearheaded the air campaign against Gaddafi's military by the NATO military alliance, which has launched nearly 1,000 strike sorties since March 31.


U.S. President
Barack Obama makes a statement to the press on the death of Libya's former leader Muammar Gaddafi, from the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, October 20, 2011. Photo: Reuters

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NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance will begin Friday winding up its six-month mission in Libya.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi he hoped the death of Gaddafi would "turn the page of tyranny."

Arabi urged Libyans to "overcome the wounds of the past and to look to the future with no grudges or sentiments of revenge, warding off all that could disrupt national unity and peace."

UN chief Ban Ki-moon said it ushered in a "historic transition" for Libya.

"The road ahead for Libya and its people will be difficult and full of challenges. Now is the time for all Libyans to come together," he said at the UN headquarters.

Medics said at least three NTC fighters were killed and 30 wounded in Thursday's fighting in Sirte, after 18 were killed and around 180 wounded over the previous two days.

Fifty pro-Gaddafi fighters were killed and 150 taken prisoner, including three women, said NTC commander Leith. There was no independent confirmation of the toll.


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