Libya's transitional leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil was quite clear about his intentions for liberated Libya Sunday, Oct. 23, when he addressed a crowd of tens of thousands in Benghazi celebrating Muammar Qaddafi's death: "Libyan laws in future would have Sharia, the Islamic code, as its basic source," he declared and promised to revoke the Qaddafi code which outlawed polygamy and restore the Islamic banking laws banning interest on loans. "Interest creates disease and hatred among people," said Abdul-Jalil.
As he spoke, the Islamic law which requires immediate burial was flouted by Libyans still queuing up to view the bodies of the dead ruler and his son Mutassim lying in a Misrata cold meat store - four days after their deaths.
Qaddafi was killed Thursday after a rebel fighter discovered him hiding in a drainage pipe in his hometown of Sirte, Qaddafi's birthplace and one of the last bastions of loyalist support in Libya.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND, knew where Qaddafi was staying in Sirte, according to German magazine Der Spiegel, but sources said the agency did not release any data on his location that could have facilitated a targeted attack on the former Libyan leader.
US intelligence agencies collected highly personal information on their allies, according to a report in weekly magazine Focus on Monday.
Staff at the Central Intelligence Agency were expected to keep tabs on communist East German spies during the Cold War, but US documents show they were doing the same to their supposed friends at West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).
Gaddafi – confused, bloodied, stumbling – can be heard to reply, in what could be his last, laughably philosophical words: "Do you know right from wrong?"
What happened in the next minutes is the subject of intense controversy. Sometime in the next hours or minutes he died of a bullet wound to the left temple. The official NTC account says he was caught in crossfire as he was being driven to hospital. "He was already under arrest and he was hit in the crossfire," explained Mahmoud Jalil, the prime minister.
However the ambulance driver who ferried him said Col Gaddafi was already dead when he was loaded into the ambulance, around 500 yards from his point of capture.
One NTC member, who did not want to be named, admitted that this version of events was likely. "They beat him very harshly and then they killed him," he said. "This is a war."
(Sirte) – Fifty-three people, apparent Gaddafi supporters, seem to have been executed at a hotel in Sirte last week, Human Rights Watch said today. The hotel is in an area of the city that was under the control of anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata before the killings took place.
Human Rights Watch called on Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) to conduct an immediate and transparent investigation into the apparent mass execution and to bring those responsible to justice.
“We found 53 decomposing bodies, apparently Gaddafi supporters, at an abandoned hotel in Sirte, and some had their hands bound behind their backs when they were shot,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who investigated the killings. “This requires the immediate attention of the Libyan authorities to investigate what happened and hold accountable those responsible.”
Speaking on state television, the embattled Gadaffi insisted the uprising against his 41-year rule was not a people's revolt as in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, but fuelled by Osama bin Laden's network.
In marked contrast to a 75-minute address from a podium outside his Tripoli home on Tuesday, this time Gadaffi spoke by telephone from an undisclosed location in an intervention that lasted barely 20 minutes.
(Misrata) – Vast amounts of unsecured explosive weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, remain unguarded in the area around Sirte, Libya, Human Rights Watch said today. The National Transitional Council (NTC), Libya’s transitional government, has promised for months that it would secure weapons facilities.
Two unguarded sites near Sirte inspected by Human Rights Watch on October 22, 2011, contained surface-to-air missiles, tank and mortar rounds, large numbers of munitions, and thousands of guided and unguided aerial weapons .
