Libyans, world hail Khadafy's death

LIBYA – With Col. Moammar Khadafy’s death, Libyans now had the ultimate trophies of the revolution – the colonel’s golden gun, his satellite phone, his brown scarf, and one black boot – as world leaders hailed the end of an era of despotism and tyranny in the African state.

A small group of fighters from Misrata, the vanguard of the force attacking Khadafy’s former hometown and final hideout, Sirte, said they had stumbled upon him hiding in a drainage pipe. He was bleeding from his head and chest, but he was well enough to speak, with his trademark indignation.

“When he saw us, he said, ‘What’s happening?’ Those were the words that he spoke,” said Omran Shaaban, a 21-year-old Misrata fighter who said he and a friend were the first men in their unit to find Khadafy.

“He called us ‘rats’, but look where we found him,” said Ahmed Al Sahati, a 27-year-old government fighter, standing next to two stinking drainage pipes under a six-lane highway near Sirte.

Don’t kill me

Dragged from hiding in the drainage pipe, the wounded Khadafy 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

Khadafy was carrying what Mr. Shaaban described as a “sack of magic charms.” He had a silver pistol in his hand, and in a bag, the fighters found the golden gun.

The death of Khadafy, 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 Khadafy 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 Khadafy’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.

“This is a momentous day in the history of Libya, the dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted,” Obama said, adding that Khadafy’s demise vindicated the collective military action launched by the West earlier this year.

He urged Libyans to now look to the future and build a “democratic” and “tolerant” nation.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also welcomed a chance for Libya’s “democratic future” as he remembered Khadafy’s victims, including those who died in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said it was “a major step forward in the battle fought for more than eight months by the Libyan people to liberate themselves from the dictatorial and violent regime imposed on them for more than 40 years.”

“A new page is turning for the Libyan people, one of reconciliation in unity and freedom,” he added.

On Thursday night, Mr. Shaaban, a student wearing a brown leather jacket, and his colleagues celebrated their victory in the Misrata council meeting room here, hugging one another and passing around the colonel’s prized last possessions. It was a windfall of spoils for the young men, who have lived only half as long as Colonel Khadafy ruled Libya, and for Misrata, the Mediterranean port city that is their hometown.

Misrata suffered grievously under a long siege by Colonel Khadafy’s troops in the spring. It responded with rage, sending out its battle-hardened fighters, first to capture Tripoli and, on Thursday, Sirte. As the bodies of the colonel and his son Muatassim were displayed for onlookers here in private homes on Thursday night, it struck many Misratans as a fitting end, providing a measure of comfort to a brutalized city — and a bargaining chip for its place in a post-Khadafy Libyan government.

“Misrata will sleep very happily tonight,” said Dr. Suleiman Fortia, a member of the Transitional National Council from the city.

At the house where Muatassim Khadafy’s body was being displayed, a man who had come to see put it more simply. “Thank God, we caught him,” he said.

It remained to be seen whether Misrata’s achievement would soothe resentments against the city re lingering from the war. Its fighters threw their weight around in Tripoli and were enthusiastic looters of vanquished loyalist cities. Traveling to Misrata in recent weeks practically required a visa. Their neighbors in the city of Tawerga, accused of fighting in support of Colonel Khadafy, fled their city in August having been told by the Misratans that they should not return.

Last moments

Bloody images of Khadafy’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 Khadafy, with blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt.

Khadafy 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 Khadafy was dragged off the hood, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance.

Later footage showed fighters rolling Khadafy’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 Khadafy. 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 Khadafy made many defiant speeches, was packed with revelers.

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 national 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, Khadafy created a “revolutionary” 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, Khadafy posed as a Third World leader, while funding militants, terror groups and guerrilla armies. 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 the following year, as well as the 1986 bombing of a German discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen that killed three people.

The day began with revolutionary forces bearing down on the last of Khadafy’s heavily armed loyalists who in recent days had been squeezed into a block of buildings of about 700 square yards.

A large convoy of vehicles moved out of the buildings, and revolutionary forces moved to intercept it, said Fathi Bashagha, spokesman for the Misrata Military Council, which commanded the fighters who captured him. At 8:30 a.m., NATO warplanes struck the convoy, a hit that stopped it from escaping, according to French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet.

Fighters then clashed with loyalists in the convoy for three hours, with rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft weapons and machine guns. Members of the convoy got out of the vehicles, Bashagha said.

Khadafy and other supporters fled on foot, with fighters in pursuit, he said. A Khadafy bodyguard captured as they ran away gave a similar account to Arab TV stations.

Khadafy and several bodyguards took refuge in a drainage pipe under a highway nearby. After clashes ensued, Khadafy emerged, telling the fighters outside, “What do you want? Don’t kill me, my sons,” according to Bashagha and Hassan Doua, a fighter who was among those who captured him.

Bashagha said Khadafy died in the ambulance from wounds suffered during the clashes. Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a doctor who accompanied the body in the ambulance during the 120-mile drive to Misrata, said Khadafy died from two bullet wounds – to the head and chest.

A government account of Khadafy’s death said he was captured unharmed and later was mortally wounded in the crossfire from both sides.

Khadafy shot by aid?

But a fighter identified as Omran Jouma Shawan said Khadafy was shot and wounded at the last minute by one of his own men.

“One of Moammar Khadafy’s guards shot him in the chest,” said Shawan.

Amnesty International urged the revolutionary fighters to give a complete report, saying it was essential to conduct “a full, independent, and impartial inquiry to establish the circumstances of Col. Khadafy’s death.”

The TV images of Khadafy’s bloodied body sent ripples across the Arab world and on social networks such as Twitter.

Many wondered whether a similar fate awaits Syria’s Bashar Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, two leaders clinging to power in the face of long-running Arab Spring uprisings. For the millions of Arabs yearning for freedom, democracy and new leadership, the death of one of the region’s most brutal dictators will likely inspire and invigorate the movement for change.

As word spread of Khadafy’s death, jubilant Libyans poured into Tripoli’s central Martyr’s Square, chanting “Syria! Syria!” – urging the Syrian opposition on to victory.

“This will signal the death of the idea that Arab leaders are invincible,” said Egyptian activist and blogger Hossam Hamalawi. “Mubarak is in a cage, Ben Ali ran away, and now Khadafy killed. ... All this will bring down the red line that we can’t get these guys.”

Thursday’s final blows to the Khadafy regime allow Libya’s interim leadership, the National Transitional Council, to declare the entire country liberated.

Information Minister Mahmoud Shammam told AP that Muatassim Khadafy was killed in Sirte. Abdel-Aziz, the doctor who accompanied Khadafy’s body in the ambulance, said Muatassim was shot in the chest. Also killed was Khadafy’s Defense Minister Abu Bakr Younis.

Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagi said Seif al-Islam Khadafy had been wounded in the leg and was being held in a hospital in the city of Zlitan, northwest of Sirte. Shammam said Seif was captured in Sirte, but the senior NTC leadership did not immediately confirm.

The National Council will declare liberation on Saturday, Mohamed Sayeh, a senior council member, said. That begins a key timetable toward creating a new system: The NTC has always said it will form a new interim government within a month of liberation and will hold elections within eight months.

But the revolutionary forces are an unruly mix of militias from Libya’s major cities, and already differences have emerged between them. Revolutionaries from Tripoli, Misrata and Benghazi – Libya’s second-largest city that has served as the rebel capital during the civil war – have exchanged accusations that each is trying to dominate the new rule.

Also, Islamic fundamentalists have taken an increasingly prominent role, pushing for some form of Islamic state in Libya, causing friction with more secular leaders.

“Libyans aim for multiparty politics, justice, democracy and freedom,” said Libyan Defense Minister Jalal al-Degheili. “The end of Khadafy is not the aim, we say the minor struggle is over. The bigger struggle is now coming. This will not happen unless all the Libyan people are ... united.”

Meanwhile, the Philippine government is looking forward to a smooth transition to a democratic and just society in Libya, following the death of Khadafy.

Deputy Presidential spokeswoman Abigail Valte said they hope the people of Libya would find “a better way forward” after more than four decades of autocratic rule by Khadafy.

“We wish the Libyan people the best as they transition to a democratic, just, and equitable society,” Valte said in a text message.