Libyan prime minister confirms Gaddafi killed as Sirte is overrun

TRIPOLI, Libya — Revolutionary fighters overran the last loyalist stronghold in Libya and killed former Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi on Thursday, bringing to a dramatic close an eight-month war backed by NATO.

Gaddafi, 69, the long-entrenched autocrat who was driven from power in Tripoli two months ago, was killed when revolutionaries ended loyalist resistance in Sirte, his birthplace and home town, the new government announced.

“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time,” Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told a news conference here. “Moammar Gaddafi has been killed.”

The confirmation came after hours of conflicting reports following the final assault on Sirte, Gaddafi’s last refuge about 280 miles east of Tripoli. It was not immediately clear whether he was killed by a NATO airstrike or by Libyan revolutionaries who intercepted his attempt to flee the city.

Libyan Information Minister Mahmoud Shammam said Gaddafi was in a convoy that came under fire.

Initial reports said Gaddafi had been captured or wounded.

After about 90 minutes of fighting early Thursday, revolutionaries overran the last pro-Gaddafi holdouts in the Mediterranean coastal city of Sirte and effectively brought an end to an eight-month war in which NATO intervened militarily to protect a pro-democracy uprising. Gaddafi, who had ruled Libya for 42 years since coming to power in a military coup, vanished as the revolutionaries seized control, and his whereabouts remained a mystery until Thursday’s fall of Sirte.

Libyan officials initially said Gaddafi was seized by revolutionary fighters. News agencies distributed a cellphone photo purporting to show a bloodied Gaddafi in the custody of fighters, but it was not clear from the image whether he was alive or dead.

“He’s captured. We don’t know if he’s dead or not,” Ibrahim Mohammed Shirkasiya, a senior security official in Misurata, the biggest city west of Sirte, said by telephone shortly after the battle. He said his information came from revolutionary commanders in Sirte.

Al-Jazeera later showed footage of a bloodied and apparently lifeless man who resembled Gaddafi. The network said it obtained cellphone footage from a former rebel fighter who was present. The man’s face had a goatee, as Gaddafi had favored, and blood was visible around his mouth and nose, with a trickle coming from his right ear. His left arm was still in a brown shirt, which had been unbuttoned and mostly stripped off. A crowd of people surrounded the body, chanting anti-Gaddafi slogans.

Celebrations erupted in Sirte and in other parts of the country as word spread of the fall of the city and the possible capture or slaying of Gaddafi.

The final battle for Sirte began at about 8 a.m. local time and ended about an hour and a half later, the Associated Press reported. Gaddafi’s last holdouts were squeezed into a residential area of about 700 square yards as they came under fire from surrounding buildings.

Just before the final battle, about five carloads of Gaddafi loyalists tried to flee the enclave but came under fire from revolutionaries, who killed about 20 of them, AP reported.

{Source: Washington Post}

{jcomments off}