Libya after Gaddafi – live updates

• What role did Nato play in Gaddafi’s death? • Confusion still surrounds fate of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi • Nato meets to discuss ending the bombing campaign • Q&A on Gaddafi’s death and what happens next 12.06pm: Anti-government protesters in Syria have been celebrating the death of Gaddafi and warning Bashar al-Assad that he will be next. In the town of Taftanaz in northern Syria protesters waved flags of the Libyan interim government . In this video , also from the northern province of Idlib, a placard is held up an showing cartoon images of Gaddafi and Assad with an equals sign in between. 12.04pm: The Associated Press has more on the delayed burial of Muammar Gaddafi’s body. Libyan officials told the news agency the burial would be delayed until his death could be further examined and a decision had been made about where to inter the body. The NTC had said it would bury the body today, in accordance with Islamic tradition. However, they seem to have changed their minds, perhaps in the face of questions from the UN human rights office and others over exactly how Gaddafi died. Mahmoud Shammam, the NTC’s information minister, said the body was still in Misrata, where it was taken after he was found in his hometown of Sirte. Shammam said revolutionary forces were discussing where it should be buried. Shammam’s account of Gaddafi’s death echoes that of Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister ( see 8.19am ). It is thought Gaddafi’s convoy was hit by a Nato air strike near Sirte and Gaddafi and others escaped to a drainage pipe. Jibril said Gaddafi was taken out, shot in his right arm “when we started moving him”, and put in a truck, which moved away, at which point he was “caught in crossfire between the revolutionaries and Gaddafi forces” and shot in the head. He died before reaching hospital, Jibril said. Shammam also said the former leader was killed by a bullet to the head and died in an ambulance on the way to a field hospital. He was already injured from battle when he was found in the drainage pipe in Sirte, Shammam said, adding: It seems like the bullet was a stray and it could have come from the revolutionaries or the loyalists. The problem is everyone around the event is giving his own story. If Jibril and Shammam’s version is true, it is unclear at what point Gaddafi, still alive, was manhandled onto the bonnet of a car, and paraded around by a crowd of fighters, apparently in Sirte, before his body was rolled around in the street, and then paraded on a car through Misrata, as mobile phone video footage shows. 11.45am: We reported earlier that Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, had been captured. Reports differ, with some sources telling Sky News Senussi has escaped to Niger. 11.34am: Al-Jazeera’s James Bays reports that the NTC says it will announce “national liberation” on Saturday . He says the announcement will be made from Benghazi, the base for the NTC throughout the civil war. The council had said that they would declare the liberation of Libya after Sirte fell . 11.34am: Activists say protesters pouring into Syria’s streets are cheering the death of Gaddafi. This morning security forces at a checkpoint shot dead two people in the central city of Homs, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The death of Gaddafi appears to have reinvigorated Syria’s protesters, who say President Bashar Assad’s regime will be the next to unravel. Protesters carried signs that read: “We congratulate Libyan rebels for the victory.” Dozens also were seen marching in the Damascus suburb of Douma, chanting slogans calling on Assad to resign. The Local Co-ordination Committees, which monitor protests in Syria, said a “massive demonstration” in Daraa today was “congratulating Libyans” and calling for the toppling of the Assad regime. 11.22am: A Nato official has told the Associated Press that commanders were not aware that Muammar Gaddafi was in the convoy that was struck yesterday by missiles fired from a French warplane, after which Gaddafi was captured and then killed. “The convoy was a clear military target,” said the official. “We later learned that Gaddafi was in the convoy. Therefore the strike likely contributed to his capture.” 11.19am: Saif update from Reuters: Flash: Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam fleeing south towards Libya’s border with Niger – NTC 11.17am: Sky News is reporting that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is heading south towards Niger. 11.16am: Reuters has more on the Nato meeting today expected to phase out the alliance’s mission in Libya now Gaddafi is dead and his last stronghold Sirte has fallen. Nato officials and diplomats told the news agency that a decision to gradually wind down the mission was expected to be taken at a meeting of ambassadors of the 28 Nato nations in Brussels starting at 3.30pm BST. The decision would be based on recommendations from Nato military commanders. One Nato diplomat told Reuters: It’s likely they will decide to end the operation, but they will probably decide to do that over the next two weeks or so. But a Nato official said some air operations would continue for the time being. “Certainly surveillance will continue as we need to continue to monitor the situation.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said today: “Clearly the operation is coming to its end.” William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said yesterday Gaddafi’s death brought the end of the operation “much closer”, but added: “I think we will want to be sure there are not other pockets of pro-Gaddafi forces still able to threaten the civilian population.” Philip Hammond, the British defence secretary, said today the mission seemed to have come to an end but no one could say their might not be a few pockets of resistance here and there. “If the cause of the threat to the civilian population in the form of Gaddafi is out of the picture, or if his forces no longer control any part of Libyan territory, that would normally mean that operations should stop,” said Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies thinktank. “It certainly would be very difficult to sustain them vis-a-vis the UN security council resolution … in this case it would become impossible to justify.” 11.06am: Gaddafi’s death does not seem to have done much to unify the various political factions in Libya. Middle East commentator Sultan al-Qassemi has been tweeting details of an interview given by Sabri Malek of the Libyan Democratic Party to BBC News on Friday morning, in which Malek had strong words for Mahmoud Jibril, the interim president. Here are some of the quotes: The NTC is set up by Mahmoud Jibril, ally of Gaddafi for ten years, he’s not a democrat The Libyans don’t trust him. He was imposed on us by the west. Mahmoud Jibril should resign today but he doesn’t want to resign. The last sentence is a reference to his assertions that he would step down. Tensions had already been brewing for a while. The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Julian Borger, has written about the potential for splits between the victorious factions that brought about Gaddafi’s downfall . Abdel Hakim Balhaj, the leader of the Tripoli Military Council, has previously warned that Islamists should not be excluded from political process in the new Libya. And Jibril had already been the subject of some unrest . 11.03am: Middle East expert Juan Cole, who was opposed to the Iraq war but backed Nato’s Libya campaign, is optimistic about the post-Gaddafi era despite the inevitable factionalism and power struggles. In a post on his blog he writes: Those who expect Libya now to fragment, or to turn into a North African Baghdad, are likely to be disappointed. It is improbable that Gaddafi’s cult will long survive him, at least on any significant scale. Libya has no sectarian divides of the Sunni-Shiite sort. Almost everyone is a Sunni Muslim. It does have an ethnic divide, as between Arabs and Berbers. But the Berbers are bilingual in Arabic, and are in no doubt as to their Libyan identity. The Berbers vigorously joined in the revolution and more or less saved it, and are very likely to be richly rewarded by the new state. The east-west divide only became dire because Gaddafi increasingly showed favouritism toward the west. A more or less democratic government that spreads around the oil largesse more equitably could easily overcome this divide, which is contingent and not structural. Libyan identity is not in doubt … Oil states most often generate enough employment not only for their own populations but for a large expatriate work force as well. Just as the pessimists were surprised to find that post-Gaddafi Tripoli was relatively calm and quickly overcame initial problems of food, water and services, so they are likely to discover that the country as a whole muddles through. 10.46am: The BBC’s Caroline Hawley, in Tripoli, reports that the Libyan fighters who captured Gaddafi (and possible killed him depending on which version of events you believe) are refusing to hand over his body to the NTC. The NTC have come under pressure to hold a full autopsy , amid the controversy surrounding the circumstances of his death. 10.25am: As Nato meets to consider the future of the Libya campaign , France said it considers the mission completed. AFP quoted foreign minister Alain Juppe as saying: I think we can say that the military operation is finished, that the whole of Libyan territory is under the control of the National Transitional Council and that, subject to a few transitory measures in the week to come, the Nato operation has arrived at its end. The operation must now conclude because our objective, which was to accompany the forces of the National Transitional Council in the liberation of their territory, has now been reached. 10.16am: The UN’s human rights office is now also calling for an investigation into Gaddafi’s death, AP reports. A spokesman for the UN high commissioner for human rights says shaky amateur videos showing a captured Gaddafi first alive, then dead, were “very disturbing”. Rupert Colville told reporters in Geneva on Friday that an existing UN panel investigating human rights abuses in Libya would likely examine the death. He says it might recommend a national or international probe. Colville says the victims of Gaddafi’s despotic 42-year-rule deserve to see proper judicial procedures followed and perpetrators of abuses brought to trial. Both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have also called for an investigation. Meanwhile, a doctor who examined Gaddafi’s body said he was killed by a bullet in his intestines, Reuters reports. “Gaddafi was arrested while he was alive but he was killed later. There was a bullet and that was the primary reason for his death; it penetrated his gut,” doctor Ibrahim Tika told Al-Arabiya television. “Then there was another bullet in the head that went in and out of his head.” Tika, who also examined Gaddafi’s son Mutassim after he was killed on Thursday, said his findings indicated he had died after his father. “[As for] Mutassim, there was an injury, a big opening in the area above his chest and directly under his neck. There were three injuries from the rear in his back and at the back of his leg and there was a shrapnel but it was a few days old in his leg,” Tika said. 10.09am: Where is Saif al-Islam? Reports surrounding the fate of Gaddafi’s most recognisable son, wooed by some in the west for his perceived reformist credentials prior to the war, remain confused. He earned notoriety during the civil war for a number of vituperative messages aimed at his father’s opponents . Here is a summary of the various reports concerning his fate. He was attempting to flee Sirte and was being encircled by government fighters , National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters on Thursday. Another NTC official, Abdelmajid Saif al-Nasr, told al-Jazeera on Thursday that Saif was last known to have been in the area of Bani Walid and was believed to be “in the desert” around the town. Saif was wounded as he tried to flee Sirte and was detained by NTC fighters, an al-Arabiya correspondent reported. But earlier al-Arabiya reported that he had been killed on the same day as his father. He was left seriously injured by an RAF Tornado bombing strike on Sirte , the Daily Mail suggested. At one point on Thursday, Channel 4 News’s Jonathan Rugman tweeted that Saif was killed in a Nato airstrike near Bani Walid “a few days ago” , citing a Whitehall source. But the tweet was later taken down. 9.50am: There’s been an interesting reaction among leading figures in Zimbabwe and South Africa, where Gaddafi enjoyed some support, David Smith in Johannesburg points out. He forwarded this statement from the Congress of South African Trade Unions condemning what it sees as “imperialist triumphalism”. The Congress of South African Trade Unions condemns the way in which the world’s media is displaying gruesome images of the dead body of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. This triumphalism is an example of imperialist barbarism at its worst. And, the GlobalPost quotes retired major Cairo Mhandu, an MP for Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, as saying: This is a sad day for the people of Africa. This is the beginning of a new recolonisation of Africa. Through the forces of Nato and the west, we have lost one of our brothers. Muammar Gaddafi won elections and was a true leader. It is foreigners who toppled him, not Libyans. Gaddafi died fighting. He is a true African hero. 9.39am: Libya’s new government may be heeding that call for a full autopsy . Reuters tweets: FLASH: Burial of slain Libyan leader Gaddafi has been delayed “for a few days” – NTC official Earlier officials indicated that Gaddafi would be buried today in line with Islamic tradition . 9.29am: Like the Guardian, many of the world’s newspapers carried graphic images of Gaddafi’s dead body on their front pages today, as our new gallery shows. Roy Greenslade reviews how the British papers covered the story . It is one of those days when a single story dominates the news agenda – the death of Libya’s ruler, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. And it is therefore fascinating to see how the national newspapers’ front pages – the choice of picture, headline and overall presentation – reflect their own agendas. Most editors chose big images of a badly injured and bloodied Gaddafi moments before his death, though the Daily Express and Daily Star – counter-intuitive as usual – used only small pictures. The Independent (and its sister, i) tried that most difficult of tricks by running four video grabs to illustrate the drama of Gaddafi being dragged from a truck. Headline: “End of a tyrant.” The Daily Telegraph and The Sun selected the same picture of Gaddafi on top of the truck. But the headlines were very different. The former chose “No mercy for a merciless tyrant” while the latter preferred the more personalised and vengeful “That’s for Lockerbie.” 9.20am: Libyan authorities are planning a secret burial of Gaddafi within the next few hours , according to the BBC. Amnesty International has called for an investigation into Gaddafi’s death amid widespread disbelief at the National Transitional Council’s claim that Gaddafi was caught in crossfire . Human Rights Watch has also called for an investigation . It said: The [National Transitional] Council should also investigate the circumstances leading to the death of Gaddafi, including whether he was killed while in detention, which would constitute a serious violation of the laws of war. Human Rights Watch called on the NTC to set up an internationally supervised autopsy to establish Gaddafi’s cause of death. 9.06am: New footage of Gaddafi’s son Mutassim appears to show that he too was very much alive after being captured. The clip shows his vest stained with blood as he touches a wound on his neck. A later video [warning: graphic content] showed Mutassim’s dead body on a stretcher. 9.01am: Warning: graphic content. New footage from the Global Post shows a bloodied Gaddafi clearly alive after his capture. Those around him can be heard shouting, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him! We need him alive!” throughout the footage, it says. 8.19am: Welcome to Middle East Live on the first day of the post-Gaddafi era in Libya. To take stock of what has happened, we start with a Q&A on the killing of Gaddafi, what it means for Libya, and what happens next? How did Muammar Gaddafi die? Gaddafi was trying to flee Sirte in a convoy of cars when it came under attack from French Nato jets . The convoy was then caught in a gun battle with fighters loyal to the National Transitional Council.  Wounded in the shoot-out, Gaddafi was reported to have crawled into a drain. He was then attacked by fighters loyal to the new government, one of whom beat him with a shoe.  Video emerged [warning: graphic content] which appeared to show him alive. Later photographs [warning: graphic content ]  appeared to show his corpse with a bullet wound to his temple. Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a doctor who accompanied Gaddafi’s body in an ambulance as it was taken from Sirte, said he died from two shots, to the head and chest. Libya’s interim prime minister,  Mahmoud Jibril, said Gaddafi died from a bullet wound to the head received in crossfire between government fighters and his own supporters after he had been captured in Sirte. Gaddafi had been alive when he was taken from Sirte but died a few minutes before reaching hospital, he claimed. Where is Gaddafi’s body?  The body was taken to Misrata. DNA samples have been taken.   Who else was killed? One of Gaddafi’s sons, Mutassim, died of multiple bullet wounds. Jibril said Mutassim was wounded in the head, and had five bullets in the back and one in the neck. Abu Bakr Yunis, Gaddafi former Libyan defence minister, was killed in the attack on the convoy. Who is still at large? Confusion surrounds the fate of Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam. Some reports say he has been killed, some say he has been injured, others say he is still on the run.   Who has been captured? Mansour Dhou, Gaddafi’s military commander, who led the defence of Sirte, is recovering in hospital in that city after being shot in the stomach.  Other senior figures reported captured include: Moussa Ibrahim, Gaddafi’s spokesman; Ahmed Ibrahim his cousin and education minister; and Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief. How will Gaddafi be remembered? The Guardian’s obituary of Gaddafi says:  Once the hurricane of the Arab democratic revolution began to blow, nothing seemed more obvious – or fitting – than that he, cruellest, most capricious and ruinous of Arab dictators, should be among the first three to be swept away. What has been the reaction to his death? Mahmoud Jibril, Libya’s acting prime minister : “We confirm that all the evils plus Gaddafi have vanished from this beloved country. I think it’s for the Libyans to realise that it’s time to start a new Libya, a united Libya, one people, one future.” Barack Obama : “The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted”. Hillary Clinton ‘s initial reaction caught on video: “Wow.” David Cameron : “People in Libya today have an even greater chance, after this news, of building themselves a strong and democratic future.” Ban Ki-moon , UN secretary general: “Clearly this day marks a historic transition for Libya. Yet let us recognise immediately that this is only the end of the beginning. The road ahead for Libya and its people will be difficult and full of challenges.” What happens now? The death of Gaddafi and the fall of Sirte opens the way for national elections scheduled to take place eight months after “full liberation” had been achieved. Nato is meeting today to discuss ending its campaign over Libya. Gaddafi’s death leaves Libya at a crossroads , writes the Guardian’s foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall: The post-Gaddafi road ahead for Libya is fraught by any estimate. Tens of thousands may have died in the war; the numbers could take years to verify. Many more again have been wounded, both fighters and civilians caught up in the violence. Already these maimed survivors are attacking the NTC for its failure to bring them speedy relief. A power struggle now threatens to destabilise Libya , writes our diplomatic editor, Julian Borger:  The bigger threat now is likely to be the prospect of splits among the victorious factions – the NTC leaders who first raised the banner of revolt in Benghazi at the start of the year, the Misrata militia who did much of the fighting, lost the most people and see themselves as the deserving “Spartans” of the new Libya, and the fighters from the Nafusa mountains in the west, who tipped the balance against Gaddafi in August. Muammar Gaddafi Libya Nato US foreign policy Middle East Tunisia Arab and Middle East unrest Matthew Weaver Paul Owen Haroon Siddique guardian.co.uk

Posted by on October 21, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.