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Gaddafi's widow demands inquiry into death as new video emerges of moment dictator was dragged from hiding place
• Traditional burial within 24 hours delayed so body can be examined
• Daughter called father's mobile phone as he was being taken away
By David Williams and Andrew Malone
Last updated at 11:10 PM on 21st October 2011
Colonel Gaddafi’s widow has backed international demands yesterday for an inquiry into his killing.
Rebel fighters apparently executed the wounded dictator having captured him alive.
As celebrations over the death of the 69-year-old tyrant continued throughout Libya, officials of the ruling National Transitional Council were forced to delay his secret burial for further examination of his battered body.
Both the United Nations and Amnesty International called for investigations, a call echoed by Gaddafi’s widow, Safia, from her exile in neighbouring Algeria.
Syrian TV quoted her as calling on the UN to investigate and saying she was proud of the courage shown by her husband and children.
TV reports in Dubai and Jordan claimed yesterday that Gaddafi’s daughter Aisha called her father’s mobile phone after seeing reports in Algeria that he had been captured.
The phone was answered by fighters. Aisha screamed at them and called them ‘rats’.
The shooting has raised unwanted questions about the ability of the new leadership to control the men with guns, as well as causing discomfort for Western allies about respect for justice and human rights among those who claimed to be fighting for just those ideals.
A series of graphic videos apparently taken on mobile phones clearly shows Gaddafi alive after being pulled from a concrete sewer in his home city of Sirte on Thursday morning, being manhandled by NTC fighters and then his dead body being dragged along a pavement.
It emerged that Gaddafi’s son Mutassim, who commanded the defence of Sirte, was also killed after capture.
Yesterday his body, scarred by numerous cigarette burns, was laid out beside his father’s in a makeshift mortuary at an old meat store in the coastal city of Misrata.
While few mourned the deaths, the growing row cast a shadow over the celebrations with NTC officials and fighters telling differing stories. Some denied that Gaddafi had been executed and claimed instead that he was shot in a firefight after his arrest.
But one NTC minister in the Libyan capital Tripoli told the Mail yesterday that officials had been saying for weeks that Gaddafi would be shot if cornered – a claim at odds with the official rebel line.
‘He took their blood – they had to take his,’ the senior minister said. ‘We couldn’t have stopped them even if we had tried. It was their due after seeing their brothers killed.’
Rupert Colville, a UN human rights spokesman, said: ‘There seem to be four or five different versions of how he died.
‘If you take these videos together, they are rather disturbing because you see someone who has been captured alive and then you see the same person dead.
‘We feel that it is very important that there is a serious investigation into what caused his death.’
Libya’s Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril, reading what he said was a post-mortem report, stated that Gaddafi was hauled unresisting from the sewer pipe, shot in the arm and put in a truck which was ‘caught in crossfire’ as it ferried him to hospital.
Dr Ibrahim Tika, who examined the bodies in Misrata yesterday, said: ‘There was a bullet and that was the primary reason for his death, it penetrated his gut . . . then there was another bullet that went in and out of his head.’
The medical evidence appears to support the claims of fighters involved in Gaddafi’s capture who said in the immediate aftermath that he had been shot in the stomach.
UN officials said an investigation would need to examine the ‘wealth’ of video footage which showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling the balding Gaddafi, blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt after he was dragged from the pipe.
Gaddafi could be seen struggling against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters pushed him on to the bonnet of a truck. One fighter held him down, pressing on his thigh with a pair of shoes in a show of contempt.
Fighters propped him on the hood as they drove for several moments, apparently to parade him around in victory.
‘We want him alive,’ one man shouted before Gaddafi was hauled off the bonnet, some fighters pulling his hair, towards an ambulance.
The controversy delayed the burial which under Islamic custom is meant to take place within 24 hours of death.

Ghouls snap history on a camera phone
For 42 years his image adorned virtually every propaganda billboard in Libya.
Yesterday young Libyans queued for a final, ghoulish picture of Colonel Gaddafi’s bloated, blood-streaked body.
Grinning teenagers crouched next to the grey-tinged corpse and posed for photographs, many raising their hands in the ‘Victory’ symbol. The photos have already been sent around the world on social networking websites.
The young men who posed for the bizarre pictures have never known a Libya without Gaddafi, and have grown up surrounded by giant propaganda images of the ‘Brother Leader’.
They became the driving force behind the revolution, many of them taking up arms after learning about the wider Arab Spring from social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Yesterday they came face to face with the ultimate symbol of that revolution, the battered, blood-stained corpse of the ousted tyrant.
Gaddafi’s body was taken to the coastal city of Misrata, the scene of some of the fiercest resistance to the Gaddafi regime.
Stripped to the waist, the corpse was placed on a plastic-wrapped yellow mattress in a former meat store, now a room-sized commercial freezer in a shopping centre.
Bullet wounds were clearly visible on his temple and stomach, and deep scratches were etched into his chest – marks of his violent end at the hands of a lynch mob in his birthplace, Sirte.
Rebel commander Adull-Salam Eleiwa said Gaddafi’s remains would be treated with respect and buried as quickly as possible.
Libyan authorities must agree on a secret location for Gaddafi’s grave, so that it will not become a rallying point for his loyalists.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1bUOVrwIo

A last cigarette and a swig of water, Gaddafi's son Mutassim pictured before he too died of new wounds acquired in captivity
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:18 PM on 21st October 2011
After his capture, Colonel Gaddafi’s son Mutassim was photographed swigging water and smoking a cigarette.
Sitting against a wall, Gaddafi’s fifth son wore heavily blood-stained clothes but did not appear to be seriously injured.


Yet pictures taken minutes later showed him sprawled dead on a stretcher, shot in the neck and chest.
A wound is visible on Moutassim's neck and his clothes are spattered with blood as he looks resigned to his fate
Moments before death: Mutassim lies on a sofa, his white vest bloodied after his capture
The series of mobile phone photographs raise disturbing questions about Mutassim’s death on Thursday.
Officials initially said the 34-year-old was killed in a gun battle during the final push on Sirte.
Conflicting accounts said he was captured alive after he attempted to escape the city with his father.
The grainy images prove he was indeed captured alive, but events leading to his death remained unclear.


Mutassim was his father’s national security adviser, despite masterminding a failed coup against Gaddafi in his youth.
He enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in Tripoli, and told his ex-girlfriend Talitha van Zon that he spent £1.3million a month on his hedonistic pleasures.
The Dutch glamour model said he flew to the Caribbean island of St Barts every Christmas in his private Boeing with an entourage of friends and hangers-on.
Before the fall of Libya to forces loyal the National Transitional Council, Mutassim lived a life of excess, once telling an girlfriend he spent £1.3million a month
He paid for singers such as Beyoncé and Mariah Carey to sing at his parties, where guests included Jon Bon Jovi, Lindsay Lohan and rapper Jay-Z.
Miss van Zon escaped from Libya on a humanitarian ship to Malta in August after she claimed rebel soldiers had threatened to burn her alive.
She said she and Mutassim were no longer in a relationship, but claimed he had bragged about victory over toasts of Jack Daniel’s and Coke just days before Tripoli fell to the rebels.
Meanwhile, much of Colonel Gaddafi’s multi-billion-pound fortune remains unaccounted for after his death.
A significant amount is still in the hands of surviving members of the deposed tyrant’s family, and could be used to fund insurgents in the newly liberated Libya.
The country’s vast revenues from oil and natural gas were siphoned off by Gaddafi for years, and hidden in bank accounts in Dubai, south-east Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Other sums are likely to be in neighbouring countries such as Algeria which are being used as safe havens for Gaddafi’s wife and grown-up children, and grandchildren.
It is thought that members of the Gaddafi family who fled to Algeria were carrying gold bars.
As recently as February, Gaddafi deposited £3billion with a London-based private wealth manager through a Swiss intermediary.
Since then, Treasury officials have stepped up their efforts to trace and freeze Gaddafi’s assets in the UK, which also included commercial and residential property.
In March, a £10million house in Hampstead, north London, was invaded by Libyans after the tyrant’s son, Saif al-Islam, tried to rent it out for £10,000 a week.
UK property investments also included Portman House, a retail complex in Oxford Street, London, which houses shops such as Boots and New Look, and a City office at 14 Cornhill, opposite the Bank of England.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1bUUj3kuE

How much damage could Saif still do to Britain: Why New Labour may not relish Gaddafi's son telling all in a war trial
By Richard Pendlebury
Last updated at 12:26 AM on 22nd October 2011
Saif al-Islam spent a lot of time in Britain, and is pictured here at his suite at Claridges in London
A few days after the fall of Tripoli to anti-Gaddafi forces, I visited the newly reopened Libyan foreign ministry and took tea with the head of its ‘British desk’.
Like a surprising number of senior civil servants under the old regime, he had survived the transition in place.
Our talk turned to the remarkable period during Britain’s New Labour government when Gaddafi’s Libya changed almost overnight from being a pariah state, whose operatives had killed a London policewoman and sponsored IRA terrorism, to our new best friend.
A very public signal of this rapprochement was the 2009 early release on ‘humanitarian grounds’ of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan agent convicted of the 1989 Lockerbie bombing.
Stricken with prostate cancer, Megrahi was said to have only months to live. Now, he has outlived Gaddafi.
‘The Megrahi affair was a very embarrassing one for your government,’ the Libyan foreign office mandarin smiled, politely. ‘I remember Saif al-Islam coming into this very office, just after the deal was done, and announcing “We bought them off!” He was very pleased with himself.’
Less so today.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the late dictator’s favourite son and one-time heir apparent, is reportedly on the run for his life. Some sources suggest that he is also badly wounded, possibly as a result of a strike by RAF planes.
If still alive, he is the last of the Gaddafi clan to be accounted for, following the death in Sirte on Thursday of his father, and his brother Mutassim.
And what if he is caught? Well, what a tale Saif al-Islam could tell; potentially at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which earlier this year issued an indictment against him for war crimes, allegedly committed during the Libyan rising.
The relative safety of a court dock in The Hague, or some other city in a signatory country, must now seem an attractive refuge, after the rough handling his father received in his final moments.



If captured could Saif reveal details of the meetings between his father and Tony Blair?

Will Saif be caught dead or alive? Naming no names, one wonders which of those possible outcomes certain former British government ministers, security officials and even members of the Royal Family are hoping for today.
A captive Saif al-Islam is unlikely to pull his punches under public examination. A trial would offer a last chance to inflict damage, or at least deep embarrassment, on those countries which first wooed his father, then took part in the campaign to bring about his overthrow and the consequent death or exile of most of the family.
Of course, the country about which Saif could make the most persuasive and damning revelations of behind-the-scenes deals and concession to tyranny is the United Kingdom. For Saif al-Islam was the personification of a British foreign policy failure.
He was his father’s ‘point man’ in the West. Whitehall saw him, with now shaming diplomatic pragmatism, as the acceptable future of Libya; a Mayfair sophisticate in contrast to his father’s eccentric desert tribesman.
After all, hadn’t he been educated at the London School of Economics, had pretensions to being an artist, and mouthed platitudes about democracy and change back home. He even had his own Facebook page.
Saif al-Islam also loved the high life. In 2009 he bought a £10million house with its own suede lined cinema in Hampstead. He had a reputation for womanising and threw lavish parties in St Tropez, Monte Carlo and Monenegro.
All these attributes brought him into close contact with a cabal of British politicians and tycoons who saw Saif al-Islam as the conduit for ‘normalising’ political relations, as well as getting a slice of the economic pie when sanctions against Libya were lifted.
The groundwork for the Megrahi deal and its attendant business sweeteners offered by Libya was laid early in the last decade, shaped by a cast including Gordon Brown, Lord Mandelson, Prince Andrew and a number of major British energy companies.
But the prime mover in this all of this was the then PM, Tony Blair.
In August 2003, Libya agreed to compensate the Lockerbie victims and ‘accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials’ over the bombing. Five days later, Mr Blair introduced a UN resolution to lift sanctions against Tripoli.
The following March, Blair and Gaddafi Senior met in a tent outside the Libyan capital to discuss bilateral relations. On Blair’s ‘farewell tour’ of Africa in 2007 there was another fond embrace, and the legal structure that would assist in securing the repatriation of Megrahi was put in place.
Shortly afterwards, BP signed a £545million deal to drill for Libyan oil. The company was committed to spending more than £10billion over the following decade if yield predictions were realised.
A toe-curling letter dating from that same year shows how important Saif al-Islam was to this lucrative if highly controversial love-in.
We know its contents because it was found recently in the looted British embassy in Tripoli. It was a personal note by prime minister Blair to the tyrant’s son, regarding the latter’s LSE PhD thesis.
Blair addressed the playboy as ‘Dear Engineer Saif’ (he had studied the subject), spoke of his warm wishes and offered suggestions that ‘might help you with your studies’.
Saif later donated £1.5million to the LSE. His PhD would appear to contain long tracts of plagiarised work, while the rest might have been written by someone else entirely.
What was important to the Blair government was that Saif-Al Islam was kept onside.
One point of contact for him was Prince Andrew, then Britain’s special trade ambassador.
He and Saif al-Islam shared similar tastes. They even holidayed together. The Libyan stayed at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace at Andrew’s invitation.
Another major player in this cultivation of Saif al-Islam was Lord Mandelson. In August 2009 Mandelson, the then business secretary, was a holiday guest of the Rothschild family at their villa on Corfu. Another invitee was Master Gaddafi, whom Mandelson had met at least once before.
They shared a mutual friend in the hedge fund tycoon Nat Rothschild, who also knew Prince Andrew, as well as the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, another chum of the Libyan.
Both oil prices and Megrahi were discussed by Gaddafi junior and Mandelson during their stay, it was alleged, though Mandelson later said it was a ‘brief’ discussion and that he had no involvement in the decision to release Megrahi just weeks later.
Saif al-Islam, who escorted Megrahi back to Tripoli, declared on Libyan TV: ‘In all commercial contracts for oil and gas with Britain, [Megrahi] was always on the negotiating table.’
‘We bought them off!’ he crowed in private. Brought to justice, he might well spell out what price Britain really paid.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1bUY5l09z

Gaddafi thugs gunned down in cold blood by the Libya 'good guys' who 'regard themselves as above the law'Growing concerns over possible war crimes by rebel fighters
53 people shot dead at Mahari Hotel in Sirte, Gadaffi's last stronghold
By Sam Greenhill
Last updated at 1:11 AM on 25th October 2011
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1blDTDx60

Gaddafi's killers.........
sodomised with a knife before being shot dead

Gaddafi's killers will be put on trial over mob execution, vow Libya's new rulersBy Sam Greenhill
Last updated at 12:57 AM on 28th October 2011
The revolutionary fighters responsible for Colonel Gaddafi’s alleged mob execution will be put on trial, Libya’s new rulers declared yesterday.
About a dozen rebels who were present when the captured despot was beaten and apparently
sodomised with a knife before being shot dead
will all face justice.
‘Whoever is responsible will be judged and given a fair trial,’ pledged Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, vice chairman of the ruling National Transitional Council at a press conference.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1c3H3ZTi5

Tuesday 01 November 2011
Libya: revolutionaries turn on each other as fears grow for law and order
Hundreds of revolutionaries fought each other at a hospital in Tripoli early on Monday, in the biggest armed clash between allies since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
Libya: revolutionaries turn on each other as fears grow for law and order
Hundreds of revolutionaries fought each other at a hospital in Tripoli early on Monday, in the biggest armed clash between allies since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
The fighting fuelled growing fears that nobody is in control of thousands of swaggering armed men who are still based in Tripoli and that the country's interim government will struggle to impose law and order.
Two people died from bullet wounds and at least seven fighters were injured during a battle that started when militia from the town of Zintan were stopped by guards from the Tripoli Brigade from entering the city's Central Hospital to kill a patient.
The hospital front door and entrance hall were afterwards left pocked with bullets, doctors and patients had to flee the building and two elderly patients died of heart attacks during the shooting, which lasted from about 1am until dawn. Heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft guns were used by both factions, supposed allies who in reality nurse a dangerous rivalry.
The shoot-out started when a group of gunmen arrived at the hospital in search of a man they had shot earlier in the night. Witnesses said the gunmen were drunk, and had come to finish the man off after learning that he had survived and been taken for medical treatment.
Doctors asked them to leave, at which point one of them pulled out a pistol and began shooting.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... order.html