Ghadaffi, the strong man of Libya is dead

There was nothing in Muammar Gaddafi’s childhood pointing to the dictator he turned out to be. He was born in 1942 in the desert south of Sirte. He joined the army in the 1960s as a admirer of Egypt’s Gamal Nasser and a fellow supporter of Arab nationalism.

In 1969 he led the coup which overthrew King Idris. The takeover was bloodless, but a 42-year reign of terror began almost immediately.
All opposition was banned, with people suspected of being counter-revolutionaries rounded up and killed.

Duringa the 1970s Gaddafi laid out his political philosophy and invented a system called ‘Jamahiriya’ which loosely translates as ‘The state of the masses’.

Thousands of ‘People’s Committees’ were formed which supposedly devolved power from the centre to the people.

However, all the while the Gaddafi clan took absolute power, enriched themselves, and oversaw mass killing both in Libya and abroad.
In 1972 the Colonel formed the ‘Islamic Legion’ comprised of mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa.
Under his direction it went on to commit atrocities in Chad.

In 1984, his agents fired on a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in London, killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher.
In 1986, after a terrorist bomb killed two US servicemen at a disco in Berlin, President Reagan ordered the airstrikes against Tripoli and Benghazi.

Two years later the Libyan regime oversaw the bombing of Pan AM flight 103 above Scotland and in 1989 it is alleged it undertook the bombing of a UTA flight over Niger.

The killings, disappearances and torture of opponents continued into the 1990s.
In 1996, 1,200 prisoners at the Abu Salim jail in Tripoli were massacred.

In the same year it is alleged that his forces opened fire on a football crowd who were booing the name of one of his sons.
The pattern of violence continued in this century even as diplomatically Libya was ‘brought in from the cold’ when Gaddafi agreed to give up his weapons of mass destruction after seeing the fate of Saddam Hussein.

 

Two months after he fell from power, former Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi was yesterday killed in his hometown of Sirte.
Reports said he begged his captors from shooting him after he was cornered.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot”, he reportedly begged after being found in a hole where he was hiding.

He and his loyalists were fleeing a NATO-led attack on Sirte where he had taken refuge.

National Transitional Council (NTC) leader and interim government Prime Minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who confirmed Gaddafi’s death, said: “We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Gaddafi has been killed”.

Apparently rejoicing over Gaddafi’s death, a government fighter, Ahmed Al Sahati, said: “He called us rats, but look where we found him”.
Gaddafi became the first leader to be killed in the Arab Spring uprisings. Accounts of his death were hazy last night.
Early yesterday, Gaddafi and his loyalists purportedly attempted to escape in a convoy of vehicles.

The convoy, which included head of the Army Abu Bakr Younis Jabr and Col Gaddafi’s son Mutassim, attempted to fight its way through NTC lines.

But French aircraft operating as part of the Nato mission attacked the convoy approximately 3-4 km west of the city near the western roundabout.

Fifteen armed pick up trucks were destroyed in the raid, but Gaddafi and some of his loyalists escaped and sought refuge in two large nearby drainage pipes filled with rubbish.

Rebel forces closed in on them. Fighter Salem Bakeer told Reuters: “At first we fired at them with anti-aircraft guns, but it was no use.
“Then we went in on foot. One of Gaddafi’s men came out waving his rifle in the air... as soon as he saw my face he started shooting at me.
“I think Gaddafi must have told them to stop.”

Gaddafi was initially captured, with serious injuries, around noon.
The Al Jazeera news channel broadcast footage showed the dazed and wounded Gaddafi gesticulating while being manhandled by fighters.
The chain of events which unfolded next remains unclear.

Salem Bakeer told Reuters: “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.”

A man claiming to be an eyewitness told the BBC that he saw Gaddafi being shot with a 9mm gun in the abdomen around 1230 local time.
NTC official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters that Gaddafi was wounded in both legs.

“He was also hit on his head,” he said. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”
An NTC information minister told Reuters that Gaddafi’s body was being taken to Misrata.
But another account said Gaddafi was lynched. A graphic video showed Gaddafi alive on his legs. Around him was a group of armed gunmen who attacked and lynched him.

Earlier, Mohamed Al-Laith, the Field Commander for the Southern District in Sirte east of Tripoli, said Gaddafi was killed while trying to escape.
Laith told AFP that Gaddafi “was inside a Chrysler jeep, which was targeted by the rebels. Gaddafi tried to flee and entered a hole trying to hide.

When he heard the rebels fire, he went out, carrying in one hand a Kalashnikov and in the other hand a pistol. He was shot in the shoulder and the head. the man was killed on the spot.” He added that Gaddafi “was wearing a suit of khaki and turban on his head.”
He denied Gaddafi was killed in a bombing by NATO forces on Sirte, asserting that “the rebels of Misrata killed him.”
Mutassim was said to have been killed along with his father.

However, Gaddafi’s eldest son Saif al-Islam was chased after trying to flee from Sirte.
A Reuter’s reporter said he saw a video of Mutasam Gaddafi detained while lying on a bed, his clothes stained with blood, but alive.
Prime Minister Jibril said Gaddafi’s death marked the end of “evils” in Libya.

“We confirm that all the evils, plus Gaddafi, have vanished from this beloved country.
“It’s time to start a new Libya, a united Libya. One people, one future”, he said, adding, a formal declaration of liberation, that will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made today.”

An NTC spokesman in Benghazi, Jalal al-Galal, said a doctor who examined Gaddafi in Misrata found he had been shot in the head and abdomen.

“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.”

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 was Gaddafi. His remains will be buried in Misrata, most likely today, according to Muslim tradition.

In Benghazi, where in February Gaddafi said he would hunt down the “rats” who had emulated their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbours by rising against him, thousands took to the streets, firing into the air and dancing under the old tricolor flag revived by Gaddafi’s opponents.

                                    

                                                                          Ghadhafi