Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's dictator for 42 years, was killed Thursday as revolutionary fighters overwhelmed his hometown of Sirte and captured the last major bastion of resistance two months after his regime fell. Interim government officials said one of Gaddafi's sons, his former national security adviser Muatassim, was also killed in Sirte and another, one-time heir apparent Seif Al-Islam, was wounded and captured. “We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Gaddafi has been killed,” Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told a news conference in the capital Tripoli. His death decisively ends a regime that had turned Libya into an international pariah and ran the oil-rich nation by the whim and brutality of its notoriously eccentric leader. Libya stands on the cusp of a new era, but its turmoil may not be over. The former rebels who now rule are disorganized and face rebuilding a country virtually without institutions by Gaddafi's design. They have already shown signs of infighting, with divisions between geographical areas and Islamist and more secular ideologies. Libya's new leaders had said they would declare the country's “liberation” after the fall of Sirte. US President Barack Obama said Gaddafi's death “marks the end of a long and painful chapter” for Libya. Vice President Joe Biden said the Libyan people had rid themselves of a dictator and have now “got a chance” with Gaddafi gone. Footage aired on Arab TV networks showed Gaddafi was captured wounded but alive in Sirte. The goateed, balding Gaddafi is seen in a blood-soaked shirt, and his face bloodied. Standing upright, he is shoved along by a crowd of fighters on a Sirte roadside, chanting “God is great.” Gaddafi appears to struggle against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters push him onto the hood of a pickup truck. “We want him alive. We want him alive,” one man shouts before Gaddafi is dragged away, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance. Later footage showed fighters rolling Gaddafi's lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head. Amnesty International called on Libyan revolutionary fighters to make public the full facts of how Gaddafi died, saying all members of the former regime should be treated humanely. The London-based rights group said it was essential to conduct “a full, independent and impartial inquiry to establish the circumstances of Col. Gaddafi's death.” Most accounts agreed Gaddafi had been holed up with heavily armed supporters in the last few buildings held by regime loyalists in his Mediterranean coastal hometown of Sirte, furiously battling advancing revolutionary fighters. At one point, a convoy tried to flee and was hit by NATO airstrikes, carried out by French warplanes. France's Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said the 80-vehicle convoy was carrying Gaddafi and was trying to escape the city. The strikes stopped the convoy but did not destroy it, and then revolutionary fighters moved in on the vehicle carrying Gaddafi himself. Fathi Bashaga, spokesman for the Misrata military council, whose forces were involved in the Sirte siege, said fighters encircled the convoy and exchanged fire with several of the vehicles. In one, they found Gaddafi, wounded in the neck, and took him to an ambulance. “What do you want?” Gaddafi said to the approaching revolutionaries, Bashaga said, citing witnesses. Gaddafi bled to death from his wounds a half-hour later, he said. Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a doctor who was part of the medical team that accompanied the body in the ambulance and examined it, said Gaddafi died from two bullet wounds, to the head and chest. Gaddafi's body was then paraded through the streets of the nearby city of Misrata 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 television. The fighters who killed Gaddafi are believed to have come from Misrata, a city that suffered a brutal weeks-long siege by Gaddafi's forces during the eight-month long civil war. The latest development gives the new leaders confidence to declare the entire country “liberated” as they have said they would do.
