Qaddafi Is Killed as Libyan Forces Take Surt

By KAREEM FAHIM and RICK GLADSTONE

MISURATA, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who fled into hiding after an armed uprising toppled his regime two months ago, met a violent and vengeful death Thursday in the hands of rebel fighters who stormed his final stronghold in his Mediterranean hometown Surt. At least one of his sons was also killed.

Al Jazeera television showed footage of Colonel Qaddafi, alive but bloody, as he was dragged around by armed men in Surt. The television also broadcast a separate clip of his half-naked torso, with eyes staring vacantly and an apparent gunshot wound to the head, as jubilant fighters fired automatic weapons in the air. A third video, posted on Youtube, showed excited fighters hovering around his lifeless-looking body, posing for photographs and yanking his limp head up and down by the hair.

Colonel Qaddafi’s body was seized by a brigade of Misurata-based fighters who had been fighting in Surt and brought to this port city in an ambulance and placed in a private house. But the authorities had to move it to another house after a few hours as hundreds of jubilant residents converged outside.

Reporters accompanying Ali Tarhouni, a deputy chairman of the Transitional National Council who went to view the body, saw Colonel Qaddafi splayed out on a mattress in a reception room, shirtless, with bullet wounds in the chest and temple and blood on his arms and hair. Three medical officials arrived, presumably to conduct an autopsy.

Conflicting accounts quickly emerged about whether Colonel Qaddafi was executed by his captors or died from gunshot wounds sustained in a firefight. But the images broadcast by Al Jazeera punctuated an emphatic and gruesome ending to his four decades as a ruthless and bombastic autocrat who had basked in his reputation as the self-styled king of kings of Africa.

“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Qaddafi has been killed,” Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister of the Transitional National Council, the interim government, told a news conference in Tripoli. Mahmoud Shammam, the council’s chief spokesman, called it “the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial.  It seems God has some other wish.”

Libyan television also reported that one of Colonel Qaddafi’s feared sons, Muatassim, was killed in Surt, showing what it said was his bloodstained corpse on a hospital gurney. There were also unconfirmed accounts that another son, Seif al-Islam, had been captured and possibly wounded.

Officials of the Transitional National Council told reporters later Thursday that Colonel Qaddafi had been killed in a crossfire when a gunfight erupted between his his captors and his supporters in Surt — making the argument that he was not killed intentionally. Forensics experts outside of Libya who viewed photographs of the bullet wound to his head, said it appeared to have been caused by a small handgun.

In Washington, President Obama said in a televised statement that the death of Colonel Qaddafi signaled the start of a new chapter for Libya. “We can definitely say that the Qaddafi regime has come to an end,” he said. “The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted and with this enormous promise the Libyan people now have a great responsibility to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship.”

Libyans rejoiced throughout the day as news of his death spread. Car horns blared and residents poured into the streets in giddy disbelief in Tripoli, Misurata and in the eastern city of Benghazi, where the rebellion against Colonel Qaddafi began in February and escalated into the most violent of the Arab Spring uprisings.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” said Tahir Busrewil, a 26 year-old tourist industry worker in Tripoli who was imprisoned and tortured earlier this year, and had spent the past few weeks working with a militia to detain pro-Qaddafi loyalists. “Oh the relief! I never felt that happy about somebody being dead.” Walid Fakany, an anti-Qaddafi fighter from the Western mountain town of Rujban, who joined in the celebrations in Tripoli, said: “We can breathe, we can finally rest. Then we can move forward.”

Holly Picket, a freelance photojournalist working in Surt, reported in a twitter feed that she had seen Colonel Qaddafi’s body in an ambulance headed for Misurata, along with 10 fighters inside with him. It was unclear from her posting whether he was dead. “From the side door, I could see a bare chest with bullet wound and a bloody hand. He was wearing gold-colored pants,” she tweeted.

Within an hour of the news of Colonel Qaddafi’s death, the Arab twittersphere lit up with gleeful comments, many of them hinting at a similar fate awaiting other Arab dictators who have sought to crush popular uprisings in their countries — most notably President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. One of them read: “Ben Ali escaped, Mubarak is in jail, Qaddafi was killed. Which fate do you prefer, Ali Abdullah Saleh? You can consult with Bashar.” Another was more direct: “Bashar al-Assad, how do you feel today?”

A popular link showed a cartoon with portraits of the five dictators — the first three with big red X’s painted over them — while below them walks an angry-looking man toting a large brush covered with red paint. Written on the man’s clothing is the word “the people,” in Arabic.

 Mr. Jibril said he had no details on how Colonel Qaddafi had been killed, saying those would be provided when the government had a clearer picture of the chaotic events. But Mr. Jibril said he was confident that he had not been killed by NATO warplanes — one of several unconfirmed accounts flying as news of Colonel Qaddafi’s death was first reported.

A senior Western official in Europe knowledgeable about NATO’s operations in Surt on Thursday said there had been strong suspicion for days that Colonel Qaddafi and his sons were ensconced in three buildings in the northwest quandrant of the city that had resisted repeated ground assaults. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said both NATO and anti-Qaddafi fighters believed that the Qaddafis, if they were in those buildings, could try to flee at any time.

He said American-supplied surveillance drones alerted NATO to an 80-vehicle convoy that fled the quandrant at dawn, and that French Mirage jets blasted two of the convoy’s armed vehicles, forcing the others to splinter. That is when anti-Quaddafi forces on the ground attacked the remaining vehicles, one of them believed to be carrying Qaddafi and perhaps his sons, the official said.

In a statement from NATO’s Libya operations headquarters in Naples, Italy, Col. Roland Lavoie, a NATO spokesman, confirmed that its aircraft had struck two armed Libyan military vehicles near Surt but that NATO officers had no idea who may have been in them. “It is not NATO policy to target specific individuals,” he said.

A BBC correspondent reporting from Surt, Gabriel Gatehouse, said he had talked to fighters there who said they had found Colonel Qaddafi hiding in a large storm drain, dragged him out, disarmed him of his golden revolver and shot him to death when he tried to escape. Mr. Gatehouse quoted one of the fighters as saying Colonel Qaddafi told him: “What did I do to you?”

Mohamed Benrasali, a member of the national council’s Tripoli Stabilization Committee, gave a differing account of Colonel Qaddafi’s end, saying that fighters from Misurata who were deployed in Surt told him that Colonel Qaddafi was captured alive in a car leaving Surt. He was badly injured, with wounds in his head and both legs, Mr. Benrasali said, and died soon after.  

Al Jazeera quoted an unidentified official of the Transitional National Council as saying Mussa Ibrahim, the former spokesman of Colonel Qaddafi, had been captured near Surt.

Colonel Qaddafi had defied repeated attempts to corner and capture him, taunting his enemies with audio broadcasts denouncing the rebel forces that felled him as stooges of NATO, which has conducted a bombing campaign against his military during the uprising under the auspices of a Security Council mandate to protect Libyan civilians.

Colonel Qaddafi’s ability to have remained at large for so long had clearly vexed the Transitional National Council, and even with his death on Thursday it was unclear whether he had been deliberately targeted or simply found by accident. Since the fall of Tripoli, American military and intelligence officials have sought to help the post-Qaddafi leaders find him but had little hard information on his whereabouts.

Libya’s new leaders themselves had said they believed that some Qaddafi family members, including the colonel and some of his sons, had been hiding in Surt or in Bani Walid, another loyalist bastion that the anti-Qaddafi forces captured earlier this week.

Officials of the post-Qaddafi government had said that the death or capture of Colonel Qaddafi would allow them to declare the country liberated and in control of its borders, and to start a process that would lead to a general election for a national council within eight months.

Libyan fighters said earlier on Thursday that they had routed the last remaining forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi from Surt, ending weeks of fierce fighting in that Mediterranean enclave east of Tripoli.

A military spokesman for the interim government, Abdel Rahman Busin, said, “Surt is fully liberated.”

The battle for Surt was supposed to have been a postscript to the Libyan conflict, but for weeks soldiers loyal to Colonel Qaddafi fiercely defended the city, first weathering NATO airstrikes and then repeated assaults by anti-Qaddafi fighters. Former rebel leaders were caught off guard by the depth of the divisions in western Libya, where the colonel’s policy of playing favorites and stoking rivalries has resulted in a series of violent confrontations.

Surt emerged as the stage for one of the war’s bloodiest fights, killing and injuring scores on both sides, decimating the city and leading to fears that the weak transitional leaders would not be able to unify the country.

The battle turned nearly two weeks ago, when the anti-Qaddafi fighters laid siege to an enormous convention center that the pro-Qaddafi troops had used as a base.

The interim leaders had claimed that the ongoing fighting had prevented them from focusing on other pressing concerns, including the proliferation of armed militias that answered to no central authority.