Libyan Dictactor, Col. Gaddafi captured and killed

Mtoday news / PTI

Tripoli, Sirte, Oct 20 : The head of the Libyan military council said that Colonel Moammar Gaddafi was killed Thursday as fighters battling the vestiges of his fallen regime wrested control of his hometown of Sirte after a prolonged struggle. Al-Jazeera television showed what it said was Colonel Gaddafi’s corpse as Libyans rejoiced.

 

 

 

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot” were the last words of slain Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi who was known for savage killing of dissidents during his reign of 42 years in the North African country.

69-year-old Gaddafi pleaded for mercy when rebels captured him while he was trying to flee from a drain where he was hiding in Sirte, the last major bastion of resistance two months after the regime fell in August.

The BBC reported that a rebel fighter claimed that Gaddafi was hiding in a hole in the centre of the city and pleaded “don’t shoot”.

"He (Gaddafi) was hit in his head," National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters. "There was a lot of firing against his group and he died."

Mlegta said earlier that Gaddafi, 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 anti-Gaddafi fighter said Gaddafi had been found hiding in a hole in the ground and had said "Don’t shoot, don’t shoot" to the men who grabbed him.

His capture followed within minutes of the fall of Sirte, a development that extinguished the last significant resistance by forces loyal to the deposed leader.

The capture of Sirte and the death of Gaddafi means Libya’s ruling NTC should now begin the task of forging a new democratic system which it had said it would get under way after the city, built as a showpiece for Gaddafi’s rule, had fallen.

Gaddafi, wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of ordering the killing of civilians, was toppled by rebel forces on August 23 after 42 years of one-man rule over the oil-producing North African state.

NTC fighters hoisted the red, black and green national flag above a large utilities building in the center of a newly-captured Sirte neighborhood and celebratory gunfire broke out among their ecstatic and relieved comrades.

Hundreds of NTC troops had surrounded the Mediterranean coastal town for weeks in a chaotic struggle that killed and wounded scores of the besieging forces and an unknown number of defenders.

NTC fighters said there were a large number of corpses inside the last redoubts of the Gaddafi troops. It was not immediately possible to verify that information.