Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images; Thaier al-Sudain/REUTERS
Left: Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters carry a young man holding what they claim to be the gold-plated gun of ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at the site where the latter was allegedly captured in the coastal Libyan city of Sirte on October 20, 2011. Right: An anti-Gaddafi fighter points at the drain where Muammar Gaddafi was hiding before he was captured in Sirte.
- Libyan Prime Minister Jibril confirms dictator’s demise
- Harper: Canada’s military mission in Libya to wind down
- Fighters brandish golden pistol ‘taken’ from Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi called the rebels who rose up against his 42-years of one-man rule “rats”, but in the end it was he who was captured cowering in a drainage pipe full of rubbish and filth.
In bizarre scenes, reports said the Former Libyan dictator was found hiding in a drainage culvert waving a golden gun as he tried to flee National Transitional Council fighters who had overrun his hometown and final bastion on Thursday.
Moments later, his bloodied body was stripped and displayed around the world from cellphone video.
Gaddafi, wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of ordering the killing of civilians, was toppled by rebel forces on Aug. 23, a week short of the 42nd anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power in 1969.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially recognized reports of Muammar Gaddafi’s death Thursday, saying the former dictator’s demise spells the beginning of a new era for the Libyan people.
He added that Canada’s military mission in Libya will wind down now that Gadhafi has been killed.
After Libyan Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril confirmed his demise, 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 that grandiose schemes had styled a new “capital of Africa”, fighters danced, brandishing the golden pistol they said they had taken from Gaddafi.
“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.
Reports suggest that shortly before dawn prayers on Thursday, 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.
But they did not get far. NATO said its aircraft struck military vehicles belonging to pro-Gaddafi forces near Sirte at about 8:30 a.m. (0630 GMT) on Thursday, but the alliance said it was unsure whether the strikes had killed Gaddafi.
Fifteen pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns lay burnt out, smashed and smouldering next to an electricity sub station some 20 metres from the main road, about two miles west of Sirte.
They had clearly been hit by a force far beyond anything the army the former rebels have assembled during eight months of revolt to overthrow the once feared leader.
But there was no bomb crater, indicating the strike may have been carried out by a helicopter gunship, or had been strafed by a fighter jet.
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 in the grass. Some 50 bodies in all.
Gaddafi himself and a handful of his men escaped death and appeared to have ran through a stand of trees towards the main road and hid in the two drainage pipes.
But a group of government fighters were on their tail.
“At first we fired at them with anti-aircraft guns, but it was no use,” said Salem Bakeer, while being feted by his comrades near the road. “Then we went in on foot.
“One of Gaddafi’s men came out waving his rifle in the air and shouting surrender, but as soon as he saw my face he started shooting at me,” he told Reuters.
“Then I think Gaddafi must have told them to stop. ’My master is here, my master is here’, he said, ‘Muammar Gaddafi is here and he is wounded’,” said Bakeer.
“We went in and brought Gaddafi out. He was saying ’what’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s going on?’. Then we took him and put him in the car,” Bakeer said.
At the time of capture, Gaddafi was already wounded with gunshots to his leg and to his back, Bakeer said.
Other government fighters who said they took part in Gaddafi’s capture, separately confirmed Bakeer’s version of events, though one said the man who ruled Libya for 42 years was shot and wounded at the last minute by one of his own men.
Fallen electricity cables partially covered the entrance to the pipes and the bodies of three men, apparently Gaddafi bodyguards lay at the entrance to one end, one in shorts probably due to a bandaged wound on his leg.
Four more bodies lay at the other end of the pipes. All black men, one had his brains blown out, another man had been decapitated, his dreadlocked head lying beside his torso.
Joyous government fighters fired their weapons in the air, shouted ”Allahu Akbar“ and posed for pictures. Others wrote graffiti on the concrete parapets of the highway.
“Gaddafi was captured here,” said one simply.
From there Gaddafi was taken to the nearby city of Sirte where he and his dwindling band of die-hard supporters had made a last stand under a rain of missile and artillery fire in a desperate two-month siege.
Video footage showed Gaddafi, dazed and wounded, but still clearly alive and gesturing with his hands as he was dragged from a pick-up truck by a crowd of angry jostling group of government soldiers who hit him and pulled his hair.
He then appeared to fall to the ground and was enveloped by the crowd. NTC officials later announced Gaddafi had died of his wounds after capture.
One of Gaddafi’s sons, heir-apparent Saif al-Islam, was at large, they believed.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is seen dead in this still image taken from video footage Thursday
After February’s uprising in the long discontented east of the country around Benghazi — inspired by the Arab Spring movements that overthrew the leaders of neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt — the revolt against Gaddafi ground slowly across the country before a dramatic turn saw Tripoli fall in August.
LIBERATION
An announcement of final liberation was expected as the chairman of the NTC prepared to address the nation of six million. They now face the challenge of turning oil wealth once monopolised by Gaddafi and his clan into a democracy that can heal an array of tribal, ethnic and regional divisions he exploited.
The two months 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.
NTC fighters hoisted the red, black and green national flag above a large utilities building in the centre of a newly-captured Sirte neighbourhood and celebratory gunfire broke out among their ecstatic and relieved comrades.
Hundreds of NTC troops had surrounded the Mediterranean coastal town for weeks in a chaotic struggle that killed and wounded scores of the besieging forces and an unknown number of defenders.
NTC fighters said there were a large number of corpses inside the last redoubts of the Gaddafi troops. It was not immediately possible to verify that information.
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