Gaddafi killed
Muammar Gaddafi is dead, Libya’s new leaders said, killed by fighters
who overran his home town and final bastion on Thursday. His bloodied
body was stripped and displayed around the world from cellphone video.
Senior officials in the interim government, which ended his 42-year
rule two months ago but had laboured to subdue thousands of diehard
loyalists, said his death would allow a declaration of “liberation”
after eight months of bloodshed.
“We confirm that all the evils, plus Gaddafi, have vanished from this
beloved country,” 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 later.
Western leaders, who had held off cautiously from comment until
Jibril spoke, echoed his sentiments now that Gaddafi, a self-styled
“king of kings” in Africa whom they had lately courted after decades of
enmity, was dead at 69.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who with French President
Nicolas Sarkozy was an early sponsor of February’s revolt in Benghazi,
said: “People in Libya today have an even greater chance after this news
of building themselves a strong and democratic future.”
The new national flag, resurrected by rebels who forced Gaddafi from
his capital Tripoli in August, filled streets and squares as jubilant
crowds whooped for joy and fired in the air.
In Sirte, a one-time fishing village and Gaddafi’s home town that
grandiose schemes had styled a new “capital of Africa”, fighters danced,
brandishing a golden pistol they said they had taken from Gaddafi.
Accounts were hazy of his final hours, which also appeared to have
cost the lives of senior aides. But top officials of the National
Transitional Council, including Abdel Majid Mlegta, said he had died of
wounds sustained in clashes.
One possible description, pieced together from various sources,
suggests that Gaddafi may have 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 NATO air strike and captured, possibly
three or four hours later, after gun battles with NTC fighters who found
him hiding in a drainage culvert.
NATO said its warplanes fired on a convoy near Sirte about 8:30 a.m.
(0630 GMT), striking two military vehicles in the group, but could not
confirm that Gaddafi had been a passenger. Accounts from his enemies
suggested his capture, and death soon after from wounds, may have taken
place around noon.
One of Gaddafi’s sons, heir-apparent Saif al-Islam, was at large,
they believed. NTC official Mlegta told Reuters that he was surrounded
after also trying to flee Sirte. Another son, Mo’tassim, whose arrest
was announced earlier in the day, had been killed resisting his captors,
Mlegta added. REUTER
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