By Agencies
BENGHAZI/Sirte: Libyan strongman Moamar Qaddafi was killed by new regime forces in their final assault on the last pocket of resistance in his hometown Sirte.
“We announce to the world that Qaddafi has been killed at the hands of the revolution,” a National Transitional Council spokesman Abdel Hafez Ghoga said.
“It is an historic moment. It is the end of tyranny and dictatorship. Qaddafi has met his fate,” he added.
“We confirm that all the evils, plus Qaddafi, 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 Qaddafi’s forces made it a symbol of the rebel cause.
Qaddafi’s bloodied body was earlier stripped and displayed around the world from cell phone video.
“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.
Qaddafi’s hometown, Sirte, had earlier fallen to the rebels.
“The city has been liberated,” says Hassan Draoua, a member of Libya’s interim government. The Libyan fighters were seen beating captured Qaddafi men in the back of trucks, with officers trying to stop them.
The final bastion of resistance by forces loyal to Qaddafi “has been liberated, and with the confirmation that Qaddafi is dead,” Libya has been completely liberated, leading military official Khalifa Haftar told AFP.
The new national flag, resurrected by rebels who forced Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi’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.
TV footage shown late Thursday showed Qaddafi captured alive by the fighters. It wasn’t clear how he died, with some theorizing he was left to bleed to death.
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.
“He [Qaddafi] was also hit in his head,” Mlegta told Reuters. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”
Mlegta told Reuters earlier that Qaddafi, 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 Qaddafi shot after he was cornered and captured in a tunnel near a roadway.
One possible description, pieced together from various sources, suggests that Qaddafi 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 am (0630 GMT), striking two military vehicles in the group, but could not confirm that Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi’s sons, heir-apparent Saif Al-Islam, was at large, they believed. 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.
Qaddafi, 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.
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 underway after the city, Qaddafi’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.
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A grab from a video taken from the mobile phone of a National Transitional Council (NTC) fighter shows the arrest of Libya’s strongman Moamer Kadhafi in Sirte on October 20, 2011. AFP PHOTO/DSK
