Moammar Gadhafi's bloody end seals rebel triumph in Libya

STAR TRIBUNE
Article by: CHRISTOPHER GILLETTE and KIM GAMEL , Associated Press
SIRTE, LIBYA - Dragged from hiding in a drainage pipe, a wounded Moammar Gadhafi 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 dictator's hair and parading his bloodied body on the hood of a truck.

The death Thursday of Gadhafi, 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. Moammar Gadhafi 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 Obama told the Libyan people: "You have won your revolution."

Bloody images of Gadhafi's last moments in his hometown of Sirte -- where revolutionary fighters overwhelmed the last of his supporters after weeks of heavy battles -- raised questions over how he died after he was captured wounded, but alive.

The official version of events -- that Gadhafi was killed in cross-fire -- was not supported by the photographs and videos. Forensics experts said the wounds appeared to have been caused by handgun fire at close range and not higher-velocity assault-rifle fire from a distance, raising the possibility that he was executed at the hands of anti-Gadhafi fighters. The conflicting accounts seemed to reflect an instability that could consume Libya after the euphoria fades about Gadhafi's death.

A senior Western official said there had been strong suspicions for days that Gadhafi and his sons were hiding in the northwest quadrant of the city, but that they might attempt to flee at any time. He said U.S.-supplied surveillance drones alerted NATO to an 80-vehicle convoy leaving that area at dawn, and that French jets blasted two of the convoy's armed vehicles. That's when Gadhafi and a handful of his men appeared to run from their convoy and take shelter in two drainage pipes, fighters on the ground said.

Jibril said Gadhafi was armed with a pistol and was wearing pants and a long-underwear shirt, a far cry from his famously flamboyant outfits. He did not resist arrest.

As he was being walked to a truck, he was shot in the right arm in an exchange of gunfire between his supporters and revolutionaries, Jibril said. The truck then got caught in crossfire as it headed toward a hospital, and Gadhafi was shot in the head, Jibril said. "That was the deadly shot," he said.

But in another version, told to Al Arabiya, Gadhafi was shot moments after his capture by an 18-year-old fighter who was hailed as a hero by his comrades.

Cellphone videos showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling Gadhafi, who had blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt.

"We got you!" revolutionaries yelled as they crowded around him. Gadhafi struggled against them, stumbling and shouting "What do you want from me?" One fighter held him down, pressing shoes against his thigh in a show of contempt. Fighters propped him on the hood as they drove for several moments, apparently to parade him around.

Later footage showed fighters rolling Gadhafi'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, which suffered a brutal siege by regime forces during the eight-month civil war that eventually ousted Gadhafi. Crowds cheered, "The blood of martyrs will not go in vain."

Across Tripoli well past midnight, people packed into Martyrs' Square, shouting "God is great." In Sirte, the ecstatic former rebels celebrated the city's fall after weeks of fighting by firing endless rounds into the sky, pumping their guns, knives and even a meat cleaver in the air and singing the natinal anthem.

The outpouring of joy reflected the deep hatred of a leader who had brutally warped Libya with his idiosyncratic rule. After seizing power in a 1969 coup that toppled the monarchy, Gadhafi created a system of "rule by the masses," which supposedly meant every citizen participated in government but really meant all power was in his hands. He wielded it erratically, imposing random rules while crushing opponents, often hanging anyone who plotted against him in public squares.

Abroad, Gadhafi posed as a Third World leader, while funding terror groups. His regime was blamed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the downing of a French passenger jet in Africa in 1989, as well as the 1986 bombing of a German discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen that killed three people.

Thursday's final blows to the Gadhafi regime allow Libya's interim leadership, the National Transitional Council, to declare the country liberated -- something it will announce on Saturday. That begins a key timetable toward creating a new system: The council has always said it will form a new interim government within a month of liberation and will hold elections within eight months. But underscoring the challenge ahead in building a new Libya, revolutionary forces already have exchanged accusations that each is trying to dominate the new rule.

The Washington Post, McClatchy and New York Times contributed to this report