SEWER RATS: The bodies of Moammar Khadafy loyalists lie outside the storm drains where revolutionary forces killed the Libyan dictator and later scrawled, “This is the place where the rat Khadafy was hiding.” (AP)
MR. OCTOBER: Yankee fan Mohamed El Bibi triumphantly waves Moammar Khadafy’s golden gun as jubilant Libyans celebrate his shooting the dictator dead yesterday. (AFP/Getty Images)
MR. OCTOBER: Yankee fan Mohamed El Bibi triumphantly waves Moammar Khadafy’s golden gun as jubilant Libyans celebrate his shooting the dictator dead yesterday. (AFP/Getty Images)
Moammar Khadafy, the vile dictator who for decades suffocated his people under an oppressive regime while unleashing a campaign of overseas terrorism that included blowing up a jumbo jet, was heroically erased from the earth yesterday — apparently by a young gun-slinging Yankee fan.
Khadafy was beaten, bludgeoned and shot by a wolf pack of Libyan fighters as he made a mad dash to escape his embattled hometown of Sirte — but the Libyan tyrant was ultimately done in by Bombers cap-wearing Mohamed El Bibi, 20, who was credited with firing the fatal bullet, according to Arab media.
Bibi told reporters that Khadafy had pleaded for his life, repeatedly muttering, “Don’t shoot!”
NEW VIDEO SHOWS KHADAFY BEGGING FIGHTERS ‘DO YOU KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG?’
“What do you want? Don’t kill me, my sons,” another witness quoted Khadafy as saying as he was pulled out of the dirt-filled drainage pipe where he had been hiding.
The youth was later photographed brandishing a gold pistol that he claimed to have swiped from Khadafy.
Among other developments yesterday:
* President Obama led world leaders in declaring the Libyan nightmare over and congratulated the fighters. “You have won your revolution, and now we will be a partner as you forge a future that provides dignity, freedom and opportunity,” he said.
* NATO, whose intervention in March saved the freedom fighters when they were on the brink of annihilation, was expected to declare its mission over as early as today. Sirte had been the last bastion of pro-Khadafy support.
* The National Transitional Council, which is functioning as the post-Khadafy government, is expected to declare Libya fully liberated tomorrow.
* Relatives of victims of the Lockerbie bombing, carried out by Khadafy’s men, said his death closed a chapter. “I never thought I would see the day this man, this coward, would no longer be part of the world population,” said Bert Ammerman, of River Vale, NJ, whose brother Tom died in the 1988 bombing.
There were conflicting accounts yesterday of Khadafy’s final hours, but the clearest picture to emerge was this:
Khadafy and several dozen heavily armed loyalists tried to flee their 700-square-yard stronghold in Sirte at around 8:30 a.m. local time following 13 days of bombardment.
But the gamble failed about two miles west of Sirte when their convoy of 80 military vehicles was blasted by a NATO airstrike carried out by French fighter jets and a US Predator drone.
At least 50 of his men lay dead in their vehicles, but Khadafy and a handful of his soldiers managed to flee and found refuge in two concrete storm-drain pipes under a six-lane highway.
Soldiers from the new Libyan government raced to the pipes.
“One of Khadafy’s men came out waving his rifle in the air and shouting surrender,” said fighter Salem Bakeer.
Another of Khadafy’s men shouted from the pipe,“My master is here! My master is here!” Bakeer said. “Moammar Khadafy is here, and he is wounded!”
Khadafy crawled out and was first shot by Bibi and then manhandled by the fighters — including one in a Boston Bruins shirt — who hustled him roughly toward a truck and slammed his face against the vehicle. He was beaten with his own shoes, the ultimate Islamic insult, witnesses said.
Some eyewitnesses said he may have been repeatedly shot.
Libyan government officials said the 69-year-old tyrant was packed onto a truck but died minutes before it could reach a hospital in Misrata.
While jubilant Libyans celebrated in Misrata and elsewhere, fighters scrawled graffiti over the drain pipes that read in Arabic, “This is the place where the rat Khadafy was hiding.”
Khadafy is the first Arab dictator to be killed in the Arab Spring. His death echoed the capture of Saddam Hussein, who fled to his own hometown after his army was crushed. He was found hiding in a hole.
Khadafy’s body was taken to a Misrata home, placed on the floor and covered from the waist down with a blue plastic sheet.
Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a doctor who accompanied the body in the ambulance to Misrata and examined it, said Khadafy may have died from not one but two bullet wounds — to the head and chest.
The Washington Post reported that when Libyan officials ran DNA, hair and saliva tests at the hospital to prove his identity, the hair turned out to be a wig.
There were plenty of questions still to answer. According to some anti-Khadafy fighters, his final act took place in an opulent compound and didn’t involve a sewer at all. “We found him there [in the compound],” Adel Busamir said. “We saw them beating him and someone shot him with a 9mm pistol … then they took him away.”
Military spokesman Col. Ahmed Bani in Tripoli told al-Jazeera TV that the wounded Khadafy “tried to resist, so they took him down.”
Fathi Bashaga, spokesman for the Misrata military council, whose forces were involved in the battle, said Khadafy was found alive in one of the vehicles in the ambushed convoy.
One fighter said the fatal shot was fired by one of the tyrant’s own men. “One of Moammar Khadafy’s guards shot him in the chest,” said Omran Jouma Shawan.
In any case, after Khadafy’s body reached Misrata, it was paraded through the streets on top of a vehicle surrounded by a large crowd chanting, “The blood of the martyrs will not go in vain,” according to footage aired on al-Arabiya TV.