SIRTE/PARIS/WASHINGTON: The exact circumstances of his demise are still unclear, but it appears Moammar Gadhafi was eventually summarily executed by his captors, the former subjects he once scorned as “rats.”
There were conflicting reports late Thursday night about the nature of the former Libyan leader’s final moments.

What is certain is that Gadhafi was still alive when he was captured near Sirte; disturbing images of a blood-stained and shaken, but very much alive Gadhafi being jostled by angry fighters, emerged shortly after his fleeing convoy came under NATO air attack on the highway outside Sirte.

In the video, filmed by a bystander in the crowd and later aired on television around the world, Gadhafi is shown being dragged off a vehicle’s bonnet and pulled to the ground by his hair.
“Keep him alive, keep him alive!” someone shouts. Gunshots then ring out. The camera veers off.

“They captured him alive and while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him,” one senior source in the NTC told Reuters. “He might have been resisting.”
But images of Gadhafi’s corpse several hours later left little room for imagination. Several bullet wounds, apparently inflicted at close range, mark his torso. Another seems to have struck his forehead.

In what appeared to contradict the events depicted in the video, Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council said Gadhafi was killed when a gunfight broke out after his capture between his supporters and government fighters.
Interim premier Mahmoud Jibril, said Gadhafi was shot in the head “in crossfire” between his supporters and new regime fighters after his capture.

“When he was found, he was in good health, carrying a gun,” Jibril told a press conference in Tripoli. Gadhafi was transferred from the sewage pipe where he was found under the highway, to a pickup truck, at which point he was shot in the right hand.
“When the vehicle started moving, it was caught in crossfire between Gadhafi fighters and the revolutionaries, and he was shot in the head,” Jibril said.

Jalal al-Galal spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi had earlier said he died from a bullet wound to the head. He said a doctor who examined the fallen strongman in Misrata found he had been shot in the head and abdomen.

Driven in an ambulance from Sirte, his partially stripped body was delivered to a mosque in Misrata. Senior NTC official Abdel Majid Mlegta said DNA tests were being conducted to confirm it was Gadhafi. He would be buried in Misrata, most likely by Friday.

Officials said his son, Motassim, also seen bleeding but alive in a video, had also died. Another son, heir-apparent Seif al-Islam, was variously reported to be surrounded, captured or killed as conflicting accounts of the day’s events crackled around networks of NTC fighters rejoicing in Sirte.

Gadhafi had long pledged to go down fighting, vowing he would die in Libya. But accounts by fighters claiming to have seen Gadhafi in the underground drain after fleeing his besieged convoy, painted a wholly undignified image of a desperate figure, reminiscent of Saddam Hussein found in a hole eight years ago, pleading for his life.

One possible description, pieced together from various sources, suggests Gadhafi tried to break out of his final redoubt at dawn in a convoy of vehicles after weeks of resistance. But he was stopped by a French airstrike and captured, possibly hours later, after gun battles with NTC fighters who found him hiding in the drainage culvert.
“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.

Government fighters and the scenes of sheer carnage nearby told the story of the dictator’s final hours.
Shortly before dawn prayers on Thursday, Gadhafi, surrounded by a few dozen loyal bodyguards and accompanied by the head of his now non-existent army Abu Bakr Younis Jabr, broke out of the two-month siege of Sirte and made a break for the west.

But they did not get far.

NATO said its aircraft struck military vehicles belonging to pro-Gadhafi forces near Sirte at about 8:30 a.m. (0630

GMT) Thursday, but the alliance said it was unsure whether the strikes had killed Gadhafi.

French warplanes fired a warning shot to stop a convoy of vehicles carrying Gadhafi before he was killed in clashes in Libya, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said Thursday.
The convoy of several dozen vehicles “was stopped from progressing as it sought to flee Sirte but was not destroyed by the French intervention,” Longuet told journalists.

Libyan fighters intervened, destroying the vehicles, from which “they took out Colonel Gadhafi,” he added.
He said a French plane was sent to the area after news emerged of a large convoy of up to 80 vehicles trying to flee Sirte. “A French warning shot was fired to prevent the column from proceeding and it divided,” he said, after which some of the vehicles were confronted by fighters from Libya’s National Transitional Council.

Gadhafi himself and a handful of his men escaped death and appeared to have run through a stand of trees toward the main road and hid in the two drainage pipes. But a group of government fighters were on their tail.

“At first we fired at them with anti-aircraft guns, but it was no use,” Salem Bakeer said. “Then we went in on foot.”
“Then I think Gadhafi must have told them to stop. ‘My master is here, my master is here,’ he said, ‘Moammar Gadhafi is here and he is wounded,’” said Bakeer.
“We went in and brought Gadhafi out. He was saying ‘what’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s going on?’ Then we took him and put him in the car,” Bakeer said.

At the time of capture, Gadhafi was already wounded with gunshots to his leg and to his back, Bakeer said.
Other government fighters who said they took part in Gadhafi’s capture, separately confirmed Bakeer’s version of events, though one said the man who ruled Libya for 42 years was shot and wounded at the last minute by one of his own men.

“One of Moammar Gadhafi’s guards shot him in the chest,” said Omran Jouma Shawan.
Army chief Jabr was also captured alive, Bakeer said. NTC officials later announced he was dead.
Fallen electricity cables partially covered the entrance to the pipes and the bodies of three men, apparently Gadhafi bodyguards lay at the entrance to one end. Four more bodies lay at the other end of the pipes. All dark-skinned men, one had his brains blown out, another man had been decapitated, his dreadlocked head lying beside his torso.

Joyous government fighters fired their weapons in the air, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and posed for pictures. Others wrote graffiti on the concrete parapets of the highway. “Gadhafi was captured here,” said one simply.
From there Gadhafi was taken to the nearby city of Sirte where he and his dwindling band of die-hard supporters had made a last stand under a rain of missile and artillery fire in a desperate two-month siege.

“We confirm that all the evils, plus Gadhafi, have vanished from this beloved country,” interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in Tripoli as the body was delivered, a prize of war, to Misrata, the city whose siege and suffering at the hands of Gadhafi’s forces made it a symbol of the rebel cause.

“It’s time to start a new Libya, a united Libya,” Jibril added. “One people, one future.” A formal declaration of liberation, that will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made by Friday, he said.
Gadhafi’s violent demise was hailed as a moment of liberation for Libya by Western leaders, who hailed his death and held up their own role in the downfall of the flamboyant North African strongman.