The final stand of a desperate dictator

For the last two months he had watched as his few remaining supporters were pushed back time and time again through the streets of his last bastion by the army of the NTC and the air power of Nato jets.

Now the endgame had arrived. But its final act did not last long.

Attempting to fight their way through the rebel lines, the convoy was stopped just a mile away from the town centre amid a furious gun battle.

Jets, believed to be French, strafed the vehicles with high-powered rounds and eyewitnesses described seeing 15 trucks mounted with heavy machine guns burning beside the road, smashed and smouldering near an electricity substation.

They had been hit by a force far beyond anything the motley army the rebels have assembled during eight months of revolt to overthrow the once-feared leader.

Inside the trucks and still in their seats sat the charred skeletal remains of drivers and passengers killed instantly by the strike. Other bodies -- some 50 in all -- lay mutilated and contorted, strewn in the grass.

But Gadaffi was not among them. The man who had sworn to fight to the end had fled in terror with his few remaining guards to hide in a stand of trees, pursued all the way by his enemies.

Both sides exchanged gunfire, with the NTC troops soon gaining the upper hand on their demoralised foes.

“At first we fired at them with anti-aircraft guns, but it was no use,” said fighter Salem Bakeer, while being feted by his comrades near the road. “Then we went in on foot.

“One of Gaddafi’s men came out waving his rifle in the air and shouting ‘surrender’, but as soon as he saw my face he started shooting at me.

“Then I think Gaddafi must have told them to stop. ‘My master is here, my master is here’, he said, ‘Muammar Gaddafi is here and he is wounded’.”

A search of the area uncovered two stinking drainage pipes running under the road, filled with fetid water and rubbish.

The former Libyan leader was lying prostrate inside one, battered, bloodied and suffering from numerous wounds.

He had been shot in the back and in his leg. He was then dragged from his bolthole and pushed into one of his captors’ vehicles.

“We went in and brought Gaddafi out. He was saying ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s going on?’ Then we took him and put him in the car,” Mr Bakeer said.

From there, Gaddafi was taken to Sirte, where he and his dwindling band of die-hard supporters had made a last stand under a rain of missile and artillery fire in a desperate two-month siege.

A short film shot by a soldier a little while later shows him dazed and wounded, but still alive and gesturing with his hands, as he was dragged out of the pick-up truck by a crowd of angry Government soldiers.

According to reports, he was begging for his life.

But he received little mercy from the people he had oppressed for decades. As his captors jostled him and pulled his hair, he collapsed to the ground and was enveloped by the crowd. NTC officials later announced Gaddafi had died of his wounds after capture, but it is thought the final blow was inflicted during the last few moments of the film.

Still photographs which appeared last night appeared to show a deep wound to the side of his head -- perhaps the mark of an executioner’s bullet.

Army chief Jabr was also captured alive, but NTC officials later announced he had died.

Last night, fallen electricity cables partially covered the entrance to the pipe where Gaddafi was found, and the bodies of his bodyguards lay at the entrance to one end, one in shorts, probably due to a bandaged wound on his leg. Four more bodies lay at the other end of the pipes.

Graffiti had been scrawled on the concrete parapets of the highway, saying simply that Gaddafi was captured here.

In Sirte, victorious Government fighters fired their weapons in the air, shouting “Allahu Akbar”. Their war of liberation is now over.

“He called us rats, but look where we found him,” said Ahmed al Sahati, a 27-year-old Government fighter.