Tripoli: Muammar Gaddafi was killed
on Thursday as Libya's new leaders declared they had overrun the last
bastion of his long rule, sparking wild celebrations that eight months
of war may finally be over.
Details of the death near Sirte of the fallen strongman were hazy
but it was announced by several officials of the National Transitional
Council (NTC) and backed up by a photograph of a bloodied face ringed by
familiar, Gaddafi-style curly hair.
"He was killed in an attack by the fighters. There is footage of that," the NTC's information minister, Mahmoud Shammam, said.
Western powers, who have backed the rebellion which took the capital
Tripoli two months ago, said they were still checking. NATO said its
aircraft fired on a convoy near Sirte earlier, but would not confirm
reports that Gaddafi had been a passenger.
Several NTC fighters in Sirte said they had seen Gaddafi shot dead, though their accounts varied.
With a final declaration of the country's "liberation" from 42
years of one-man rule apparently imminent, and crowds firing in the air
and dancing in the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi, Libyan television
said NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil was about to address the nation.
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.
Officials said some of Gaddafi's entourage had been killed in the
same incident, while his son Mo'tassim and other aides were taken
prisoner. Another son, Saif -- long the heir-apparent -- was believed by
the NTC to be still at large, possibly in the immense southern deserts
of the Libyan Sahara.
The death of Gaddafi himself became perhaps the most dramatic
development since the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in
neighboring Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the grip on power of the
leaders of Syria and Yemen.
"He (Gaddafi) was also hit in his head," NTC official Abdel Majid
Mlegta said. "There was a lot of firing against his group and he died."
Mlegta said that Gaddafi, who was in his late 60s, was captured
and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a
convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. He said he had been taken away by
an ambulance.
An NTC fighter in Sirte said he had seen Gaddafi shot after he was cornered and captured in a tunnel near a roadway.
The capture of Sirte means Libya's ruling NTC should now begin
the task of forging a new democratic system which it had said it would
get under way after the city, Gaddafi's hometown rebuilt as a showpiece
for his rule, had fallen.
As potentially vast revenues from oil and gas begin to roll in
again, Libya's six million people, scattered in towns spread across wide
deserts, face a major task in organizing a new system of government
that can allocate resources across long-competing tribal, ethnic and
regional divisions.
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.
NTC fighters hoisted the red, black and green national flag above
a large utilities building in the center of a newly-captured Sirte
neighborhood 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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