TRIPOLI: Joyful Libyan rebels overran Moammar Gadhafi’s Tripoli bastion Tuesday, seizing weapons and loot and destroying symbols of a 42-year dictatorship they declared was now over as they set about hunting down the fallen ruler and his sons.

“It’s over! Gadhafi is finished!” yelled one fighter over a cacophony of celebratory gunfire across the Bab al-Aziziyah compound, from where Gadhafi orchestrated eccentric defiance of Western powers and disdain for his own people for four decades.

The Western powers who backed the revolt with air power held off from pronouncing victory although a swift return to order is high on their priorities, given fears that ethnic and tribal divisions among the rebels could descend into the kind of anarchy that would thwart hopes of Libya resuming oil exports.
Rebel National Council chief Mustafa Abdel-Jalil cautioned: “It is too early to say that the battle of Tripoli is over. That won’t happen until Gadhafi and his sons are captured.”

Armed men broke up a statue of Gadhafi, kicking its face. Some seized the golf buggy the leader often used.
Another rebel sported a heavily braided, peaked military cap of a kind favored by the colonel, who seized power in 1969. He said he had taken the hat from Gadhafi’s bedroom after a brief few hours of resistance by a loyal rearguard died away.

Abdel Hakim Belhadj, a rebel commander, said he did not know where Gadhafi or his sons were: “They ran like rats.” Other rebel officials said they believed the 69-year-old “Brother Leader” was probably still not far away, but in the rebels’ eastern bastion of Benghazi, where residents also poured onto the streets in celebration, commander Col. Ahmad Omar Bani said there had been no trace of Gadhafi or his family at the compound.

“Bab al-Aziziyah is fully under our control now … Gadhafi and his sons were not there; there is nobody,” Bani said. “No one knows where they are.”
Reuters correspondents in Tripoli said there still appeared to be some hostile fire around the city center as darkness fell and looting continued.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “We’re in the death throes of this regime … But it’s still a very difficult and dangerous time. It’s not over yet.”

Senior rebel official Mahmud Jibril said the political transition in his country “begins immediately.”
“This is the new Libya, Jibril said. “This is the new Libya, where every Libyan works as a beloved brother, hand in hand, to serve the interests of the nation.”
“We have to be transparent in front of the whole world. Now we have to concentrate … on healing our wounds.”
The Russian head of the International Chess Federation, who had visited Tripoli in June, told Reuters that Gadhafi had called him Tuesday.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov said Gadhafi told him he was in the capital and was “prepared to fight to the end.”
Gadhafi had few places to make a stand. His home town of Sirte, on the Mediterranean coast between Tripoli and rebel Benghazi, was expected to welcome rebel forces shortly, Abdel-Jalil said.

“It really looks like it’s pretty much over,” said David Hartwell, a Middle East analyst at IHS Jane’s in London.
“There might be a few diehards who would keep going until he is captured or killed, but not many. And if Gadhafi didn’t have many places to hide before, he has even fewer now.”

“House to house! Room to room!” chanted some men, calling for a search of the sprawling complex of bunkers and tunnels in a mocking echo of the words Gadhafi used six months ago when he threatened to crush early stirrings of the revolt.

Inspired by neighbors in Tunisia and Egypt, Libyans who rose up in the east found protection from the air forces of Western governments who abandoned a short-lived rapprochement with Gadhafi to drive him from power and who now want to see order imposed and a swift restoration of Libyan oil exports.
After a meandering ebb and flow across the desert, rebel forces galvanized by Western advisers, NATO airstrikes and, it is widely assumed, Western special forces, swept into the capital at the weekend to be greeted by many residents.

Abdel-Jalil said that NATO bombs had helped his men breach the walls of the Bab al-Aziziyah Tuesday. “I thank all the countries that have helped us,” said the young man wearing the braided cap. “Now we should work together as Libyans.”

In the east of the country, government troops were pulling out of areas that are key to oil production, rebels said.
The U.S. State Department, in a signal of the kind of activity likely to gather pace in diplomatic meetings over the coming days, said it was seeking the immediate release of up to $1.5 billion of frozen Libyan government assets to the rebels.In Tripoli, ordinary Libyans, or at least those with guns and guts to risk the chaos in Bab al-Aziziyah, were helping themselves to the bounty Gadhafi’s inner circle had amassed in villas dotted around the city center compound.

Flat-screen television sets and hi-fi systems, as well as vacuum cleaners and Cuban cigars, were all being hefted away along with the sort of trophy rifles and handguns favored by the elite. One man shouted angrily at those taking away loot: “People have died and you are stealing!”

For many, as in other Arab nations where autocrats have been overthrown this year, the most important benefit was not tangible: “Gadhafi is now gone and we are free,” said Turqi, a shopkeeper in the capital where civilians have stayed indoors during three days of sporadic sniper fire and skirmishes.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said he believed Gadhafi was still in Libya and remained a threat. He also said the United States was monitoring chemical weapons sites in Libya given worries that groups hostile to Western interests could try to seize stocks once accumulated by Gadhafi.

After Gadhafi’s son and long-time heir-apparent Saif al-Islam confounded rebel claims of his capture by appearing to journalists at the Bab al-Aziziyah compound early Tuesday, several analysts said the credibility of the disparate opposition movement had suffered a serious setback.
Though Saif al-Islam’s claims that his father’s supporters were winning the war seem threadbare, confusion among the rebels, who seemed to have allowed two of Gadhafi’s sons to escape Monday, embarrassed their supporters.