BENGHAZI, Libya — Moammar Khadafy’s final moments showed him struggling to stay alive — bleeding from several gunshot wounds — as an angry crowd surrounded him and dragged the former dictator’s body to the back of a pick-up truck.
Hours after Khadafy’s death earlier today, questions remain surrounding the circumstances of his demise as footage appeared to show he’d been captured alive after being shot several times.
Khadafy, the longest-serving dictator in the Arab world, was captured cowering in a smelly drainage pipe after 42 years of rule.
“He called us rats, but look where we found him,” said Ahmed Al Sahati, a 27-year-old government fighter, standing next to the two large sewage pipes that run under a six-lane highway.
An anti-Khadafy fighter said the ousted leader had been found hiding in a hole in the ground and had pleaded, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot” to the men just after he’d been grabbed.
Government fighters, amateur video and witness accounts told the scenes of carnage surrounding Khadafy’s final hours.
Khadafy died after being shot in the head “in crossfire” between his supporters and government fighters, officials said, offering up one of the several accounts of what took place.
In an odd sidelight to the story of Ghadafi’s death, the Washington Post reported that when Libyan officials ran a series of DNA, hair and saliva tests at the hospital to prove his identity, the hair turned out to be a wig.
“When he was found, he was in good health, carrying a gun,” Libya’s interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril said.
Shortly before dawn prayers, Khadafy — surrounded by a few dozen loyal bodyguards and accompanied by the head of his now non-existent army Abu Bakr Younis Jabr — broke out of the two-month siege of Sirte and made a break for it.
They did not get far.
NATO said its aircraft struck military vehicles belonging to pro-Khadafy forces at about 8:30 a.m. — but the alliance said it was unsure whether the strikes had killed Khadafy.
It hadn’t.
Khadafy and several his men escaped and appeared to have run through some trees toward a main road and hid in the two drainage pipes.
But a group of government fighters were hot on their tails.
A dead Khadafy after his capture in Sirte. Two officials from the Transitional National Council (TNC) confirmed Khadafy’s death to Sky News on Thursday. (Reuters)
TNC fighters gather outside large concrete pipes where Khadafy was found. (AFP/Getty Images)
By the time he was nabbed, Khadafy had already been wounded with gunshots to his leg and back, officials said.
Abdul Hakim Belhaj, an TNC military chief, said the former dictator died from wounds after being captured.
Video footage showed Khadafy — dazed and wounded but still alive — gesturing with his hands as he was dragged from a pick-up truck by a angry crowd of government soldiers who hit him and pulled his hair.
He then appeared to fall to the ground and was enveloped by the large crowd.
“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time,” Jibril said.
Asked what would be done with Khadafy’s body, he said, “It doesn’t make any difference, as long as he disappears.”
Libyan officials also said that Khadafy’s son and one-time heir apparent Seif al-Islam was wounded and in the hospital. He has also been placed under arrest.
Images showing the seemingly bloodied face of Khadafy and video of his apparently lifeless body began flashing across TV screens in Libya and across the world hours after the first reports of the former strongman’s capture and death began to appear.
Soon after the official confirmation, the British prime minister was the first world leader to give his reaction, saying he was proud of the role the UK played in Khadafy’s downfall.
“Today is a day to remember all of Khadafy’s victims, from Lockerbie to Yvonne Fletcher, and also IRA victims killed by Libyan semtex, ” said David Cameron. ” We should remember the many, many Libyans at the hands of this brutal dictator and his regime. [I am] proud of the role Britain has played in helping Libyans to have a chance of building themselves a strong and democratic future.”
This afternoon, President Obama said Khadafy’s death marked the end of a “long and painful chapter” for the people of Libya.
Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Obama stopped short of saying whether his administration had independently confirmed that Khadafy is dead, but declared that he could “definitively say” that his regime had come to an end.
“You have won your revolution,” Obama said, adding that the US and the international community are committed to the nation’s citizens.
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The reports of Khadafy’s capture and death sparked jubilant scenes in Sirte among TNC fighters and in the capital city Tripoli.
Khalifa Haftar, a top military official among the new regime, said, “Sirte has been liberated, and with the confirmation that Khadafy is dead, Libya has been completely liberated.”
Libya’s new rulers had said that only once Sirte had fallen would they declare the country’s liberation and begin the transition to an elected government after four decades of Khadafy’s iron-fisted rule.
With Reuters