Muammar Gaddafi is dead, Libya's new leaders said, killed by fighters who overran his hometown and final bastion on Thursday. His bloodied body was stripped and displayed around the world from cellphone video.
Senior officials in the interim government, which ended his 42-year rule two months ago but had labored to subdue thousands of diehard loyalists, said his death opened the way for a declaration of "liberation" after eight months of war.
His body was expected in the long-standing rebel stronghold of Misrata, officials said as their Western sponsors held off from confirming that Gaddafi, a self-styled king of kings whom they had lately courted after decades of enmity, was dead at 69.
After Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril confirmed his demise, the new national flag, resurrected by rebels who forced Gaddafi from his capital Tripoli in August, filled streets and squares as jubilant crowds whooped for joy and fired in the air.
The final end of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. While you do not see Gaddafi assassinated, you do see him still alive in the first video. He is even fending off his captors who have him. Then near the end of the video, you will hear gunshots. In the second video you will see that Gadaffi is dead, and hear the rebels celebrate by shooting their weapons in the air. They also show his now lifeless body. So be warned, because both videos are graphic and could be very disturbing to see.
Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been Africa's and the Arab world's longest-ruling, most erratic, most grimly fascinating leader - presiding for 42 years over this desert republic with vast oil reserves and just 6 million people.
For years, he was an international pariah blamed for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people. After years of denial, Libya acknowledged responsibility, agreed to pay up to $10 million to relatives of each victim, and Gaddafi declared he would dismantle all weapons of mass destruction.
That eased him back into the international community.
In February, one week into the uprising, Gaddafi vowed to die as a "martyr" on Libyan soil
But in February, days after the uprising against him began, Gaddafi gave a televised speech amid violent social unrest against his autocratic rule. In the speech, he vowed to hunt down protesters "inch by inch, room by room, home by home, alleyway by alleyway."
The speech caused a furor that fuelled the armed rebellion against him and it has been since mocked in songs and spoofs across the Arab world.
Gaddafi came to power in 1969 after leading a bloodless coup toppling King Idris at the age of 27. He maintained tight control of his oil-rich country for decades by clamping down on dissidents.
He was born in 1942 in the coastal area of Sirte to parents who were nomads. He went to Benghazi University to study geography but dropped out to join the army.
After seizing power, he laid out a pan-Arab, anti-imperialist philosophy, blended with aspects of Islam. While he permitted private control over small companies, the government controlled the larger ones.
He was an admirer of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Arab socialist and nationalist ideology.
He tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt to join Libya and Tunisia ended in acrimony.
Crushing dissident
In 1977 he changed the country's name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah (State of the Masses) and allowed people to air their views at people's congresses.
However, critics dismissed his leadership as a military dictatorship, accusing him of repressing civil society and ruthlessly crushing dissident.
The regime has imprisoned hundreds of people for violating the law and sentenced some to death, according to Human Rights Watch.
"Gaddafi, gradually as he took power, he used force and he used brutality," Mohammed al-Abdalla, the deputy secretary-general of the National front for Salvation of Libya, told Al Jazeera.
"In the 1970s against students, when he publicly hung students who were marching, demonstrating, demanding rights in Benghazi and in Tripoli and many other squares, and his opposition members abroad in the 1980s, including here in London and other places in Europe and in in Arab Middle East.
"He executed, in probably the most brutal massacre that we saw, 1,200 prisoners in the Abu Salim prison who were unarmed, They were already in jail, he executed them in less than three hours."
Gaddafi played a prominent role in organising Arab opposition to the 1978 Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.
Later shunned by a number of Arab states on the basis of his extreme views on how to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among others, Gaddafi's foreign policy shifted from an Arab focus to an African focus.
His vision of a United States of Africa resulted in the foundation of the African Union.
Lockerbie bombing
Among his many eccentricities, Gaddafi is known to sleep in a Bedouin tent guarded by dozens of female bodyguards on trips abroad.
In the West, Gaddafi is strongly associated with "terrorism", accused of supporting armed groups including FARC in Colombia and the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Libya's alleged involvement in the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub in which two American soldiers were killed prompted US air attacks on Tripoli and Benghazi, killing 35 Libyans, including Gaddafi's adopted daughter. Ronald Reagan, the then US president, called him a "mad dog"..................
True it wasn't fair, but war seldom is fair, or just. The winners on the field of battle will always be judged with questionable eyes, even if the cause is good. Gaddafi, like Saddam, was evil, and needed to be brought to justice. Maybe a trial like Saddam would have been better, but then again the result would ultimately have been the same as it was for Saddam. Gaddafi just received his punishment in the same barbaric way he has handed down justice to others for over 40 years.
My worry is, the ones who replace him could be far worse than he was. If the Islamic brotherhood becomes the leaders of Libya, then we will be seeing the same type of injustice towards non Muslims as we are now seeing in Egypt. Democracy, needs to be equal to all sides or it is not Democracy. Iraq is a good example of Democracy trying to be administered. It is not perfect, but unlike Egypt, and I fear Libya now, the people of Iraq truly do have a government of, by, and for the people.
Men like Saddam, and Gaddafi signed their own death warrants years and years ago, because they did not believe in equal and fair justice, the way they dispatched of Gaddafi's life shows that Libya is on the wrong track already. Time will tell, but I fear that it is a sign of things to come. The sadness had just begun, for those whom the Islamic Brotherhood will eliminate and or subjugate in a fashion that is equal to the way Al-Qaeda does.
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About Me: I am a born again Christian who enjoys talking religion and politics. I have always believed that it is the Christian's obligation to understand the workings of our government as well as they do the precepts of God. Jesus tells us to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves". (Mark 10:16) So it is with this understanding that I approach life. I was born in the Midwest, and while I may have grown up in Northern Minnesota, I have earned my degree in knowledge and understanding from the many regions of America and Europe that I have either lived in or visited as an adult.
About Me: I am a born again Christian who enjoys talking religion and politics. I have always believed that it is the Christian's obligation to understand the workings of our government as well as they do the precepts of God. Jesus tells us to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves". (Mark 10:16) So it is with this understanding that I approach life. I was born in the Midwest, and while I may have grown up in Northern Minnesota, I have earned my degree in knowledge and understanding from the many regions of America and Europe that I have either lived in or visited as an adult.
what they done isnt fair
True it wasn't fair, but war seldom is fair, or just. The winners on the field of battle will always be judged with questionable eyes, even if the cause is good. Gaddafi, like Saddam, was evil, and needed to be brought to justice. Maybe a trial like Saddam would have been better, but then again the result would ultimately have been the same as it was for Saddam. Gaddafi just received his punishment in the same barbaric way he has handed down justice to others for over 40 years.
My worry is, the ones who replace him could be far worse than he was. If the Islamic brotherhood becomes the leaders of Libya, then we will be seeing the same type of injustice towards non Muslims as we are now seeing in Egypt. Democracy, needs to be equal to all sides or it is not Democracy. Iraq is a good example of Democracy trying to be administered. It is not perfect, but unlike Egypt, and I fear Libya now, the people of Iraq truly do have a government of, by, and for the people.
Men like Saddam, and Gaddafi signed their own death warrants years and years ago, because they did not believe in equal and fair justice, the way they dispatched of Gaddafi's life shows that Libya is on the wrong track already. Time will tell, but I fear that it is a sign of things to come. The sadness had just begun, for those whom the Islamic Brotherhood will eliminate and or subjugate in a fashion that is equal to the way Al-Qaeda does.