No mercy for Muammar Gaddafi

2011-10-21 07:45

Sirte - Dragged from hiding in a drainage pipe, a wounded Muammar Gaddafi raised his hands and begged revolutionary fighters: "Don't kill me, my sons." Within an hour, he was dead, but not before jubilant Libyans had vented decades of hatred by pulling the eccentric dictator's hair and parading his bloodied body on the hood of a truck.

The death on Thursday of Gaddafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom.

It also thrusts Libya into a new age in which its transitional leaders must overcome deep divisions and rebuild nearly all its institutions from scratch to achieve dreams of democracy.

"We have been waiting for this historic moment for a long time. Muammar Gaddafi has been killed," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in the capital of Tripoli. "I would like to call on Libyans to put aside the grudges and only say one word, which is Libya, Libya, Libya."

President Barack Obama told the Libyan people: "You have won your revolution."

Although the US briefly led the relentless Nato bombing campaign that sealed Gaddafi’s fate, Washington later took a secondary role to its allies. Britain and France said they hoped that his death would lead to a more democratic Libya.

Other leaders have fallen in the Arab Spring uprisings, but the 69-year-old Gaddafi is the first to be killed. He was shot to death in his hometown of Sirte, where revolutionary fighters overwhelmed the last of his loyalist supporters Thursday after weeks of heavy battles.

Pool of blood

Also killed in the city was one of his feared sons, Muatassim, while another son - one-time heir apparent Saif al-Islam - was wounded and captured. An AP reporter saw cigarette burns on Muatassim's body.

Bloody images of Gaddafi’s last moments raised questions over how exactly he died after he was captured wounded, but alive. Video on Arab television stations showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling the goateed, balding Gaddafi, with blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt.

Gaddafi struggled against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters pushed him onto the hood of a pickup truck. One fighter held him down, pressing on his thigh with a pair of shoes in a show of contempt.

Fighters propped him on the hood as they drove for several moments, apparently to parade him around in victory.

"We want him alive. We want him alive," one man shouted before Gaddafi was dragged off the hood, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance.

Later footage showed fighters rolling Gaddafi’s lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head. His body was then paraded on a car through Misrata, a nearby city that suffered a brutal siege by regime forces during the eight-month civil war that eventually ousted Gaddafi. Crowds in the streets cheered, "The blood of martyrs will not go in vain."

Thunderous celebratory gunfire and cries of "God is great" rang out across Tripoli well past midnight, leaving the smell of sulfur in the air. People wrapped revolutionary flags around toddlers and flashed V for victory signs as they leaned out car windows. Martyrs' Square, the former Green Square from which Gaddafi made many defiant speeches, was packed with revellers.

- AP