GADDIFI TOPPLED!!!!!TRIPOLI CELEBRATING!!!!!!!!

Report on Al Jazeera TV that Saif al-Islam Gadaffi has been injured and captured. LL

Al Jazeera Live Blog:

5 min 55 sec ago

The NTC's information minister says Gaddafi's son Mutassim is dead and had been hiding with his father.

45 min 55 sec ago

Al Jazeera is receiving unconfirmed reports that Saif al-Islam, Muammar Gaddafi's son, is injured and has been arrested.

From Al Jazeera Arabic: Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at the time of his capture, moments before he was killed.

I'm glad they know where Saif is.

bb1 wrote:A Libyan minister is now saying Saif has been wounded, and is in hospital. His son Mutassim is rumoured to be dead.

You mean Gadaffi's son, as Mutassim is the 5th son? LL

Lamplighter wrote:Report on Al Jazeera TV that Saif al-Islam Gadaffi has been injured and captured. LL

Al Jazeera Live Blog:

5 min 55 sec ago

The NTC's information minister says Gaddafi's son Mutassim is dead and had been hiding with his father.

45 min 55 sec ago

Al Jazeera is receiving unconfirmed reports that Saif al-Islam, Muammar Gaddafi's son, is injured and has been arrested.

From Al Jazeera Arabic: Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at the time of his capture, moments before he was killed.

He was captured alive?????

He was captured alive?????

There were so many versions of what happened that kept popping up; he was shot while escaping in a car, found hiding in a pipe and shot when he tried to run away, shot in the legs, the shoulder, the head. Who knows? LL

Yes, sorry for confusion.

Wow.

Oh, he was captured alive all right, Tony. However, he didn't stay that way for very long. Before and after were both caught on camera phones.

bb1 wrote:Oh, he was captured alive all right, Tony. However, he didn't stay that way for very long. Before and after were both caught on camera phones.

To me it looked like he was hacked with a machete-type weapon and certainly kicked and stamped upon. In the Arab world, the sole of one's shoe is an insult, which is why people were slapping their shoes on his portrait and why someone threw a shoe at GW Bush. To stamp on him would be the ultimate insult, even worse that slashing at him with a sharp object. LL

Lamplighter wrote:

Why is wearing a bra???

Lamplighter wrote:

bb1 wrote:Oh, he was captured alive all right, Tony. However, he didn't stay that way for very long. Before and after were both caught on camera phones.

To me it looked like he was hacked with a machete-type weapon and certainly kicked and stamped upon. In the Arab world, the sole of one's shoe is an insult, which is why people were slapping their shoes on his portrait and why someone threw a shoe at GW Bush. To stamp on him would be the ultimate insult, even worse that slashing at him with a sharp object. LL

As I recall, the first reports of his death were very confused; it had been assumed he had died in the air attack, and two men who had been present when he was captured were not entirely believed - it turned out their version was correct.

Am I right in thinking they were on about hitting him with shoes? I didn't hear anything about machetes, thankfully....

bb1 wrote:

Lamplighter wrote:

bb1 wrote:Oh, he was captured alive all right, Tony. However, he didn't stay that way for very long. Before and after were both caught on camera phones.

To me it looked like he was hacked with a machete-type weapon and certainly kicked and stamped upon. In the Arab world, the sole of one's shoe is an insult, which is why people were slapping their shoes on his portrait and why someone threw a shoe at GW Bush. To stamp on him would be the ultimate insult, even worse that slashing at him with a sharp object. LL

As I recall, the first reports of his death were very confused; it had been assumed he had died in the air attack, and two men who had been present when he was captured were not entirely believed - it turned out their version was correct.

Am I right in thinking they were on about hitting him with shoes? I didn't hear anything about machetes, thankfully....

If you look closely at the footage a machete or something very like it is being waved near him. It may just be a coincidence but there looks like a lot of blood. LL

This man speaks very eloquently on the subject of his death.

Bashir Ziggi, 54, a cafe owner from Tripoli who had relatives who had been tortured by Gaddafi's forces, said he would have preferred for Gaddafi to be caught alive, "He died too easily. I was hoping he could have been dragged into the square so every one of us could punish him, so he could be hanged. So he could suffer like he made others suffer." He said the post-Gaddafi future wasn't without obstacles: "There will be a little chaos like there is with all change. It's going to be tough. But we can do it. We're free."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2011/oct/20/gaddafi-killed-sirte-falls-live

I can't make out what that is, LL. Maybe Bashir hasn't realised yet, he was caught alive, Lily, and received fairly summary justice.

Which I have the ghastly feeling is bound to turn up on the internet before too long...

I think he was disappointed that he died rather quickly after being captured, Bonny?

Text from Nick Clegg: "What's happening with Ghandi??

muratfan wrote:Text from Nick Clegg: "What's happening with Ghandi??

Pardon? very confused of Tunbridge Wells. LL

Lamplighter wrote:

muratfan wrote:Text from Nick Clegg: "What's happening with Ghandi??

Pardon? very confused of Tunbridge Wells. LL

It's the joke going round Twitter, apparently the BBC have said it was offensive

Ah, right, at cross-purposes! Don't know, Lily, I think Gaddafi is well ahead in the 'Ignominious death of despot' stakes.

After that exit from this earth, there is little danger of him being seen as a martyr?

It's a Lib Dem joke, LL - we used to have Lib Dems, and things. Oor Alex rose to the occasion by declaring Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who exploited his country and brutalised the Libyan people for over four decades. He lived by the sword and has met his just-desserts and generally not caring.

Naturally, East Renfrewshire Social Work department are monitoring the situation, as Magrahi is still their problem. And the Scots police have high hopes of getting their hands on all sorts of hitherto-secret files once things have calmed down.

So, if Magrahi doesn't start talking very shortly, no-one is going to need him alive, anyway.

Thanks bonny, I have never been very political savvy, usually voted SNP as I like the idea of an independent haggis land. Political jokes go way over my head, no sense of humour, you see! LL

I assume Clegg was offended by jokes about what a waste of space he is...

I will be glad when the papers come out and maybe make a bit more sense of this at a slower pace.

Oh, first forensic reports say Gaddafi was caught in crossfire when being taken to hospital, and died of a bullet wound to the head.

I see. I am sure his guards were overcome with grief.

Link to Feb 17th site - various Arabic videos plus pics of an 18 year old lad with a golden gun, it's claimed he shot Gadaffi. LL

http://feb17.info/

I wish they hadn't done that.

It seems he definitely did get a miniscule taste of his own medicine. Don't feel sorry for him at all.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2051361/Gaddafi-dead-Dictator-begged-life-summarily-executed.html

Al Jazeera latest:

Libyans celebrate Gaddafi's death

After a moment of uncertainty, citizens take to streets and cheer final closure on decades of autocracy.
Last Modified: 20 Oct 2011 18:30

Some said they never thought it could happen, others claimed they knew it would be his fate in the end, but for all in the crowds that flocked into Libya's squares to cheer the news of Muammar Gaddafi's death, the ousted leader's bloody end marked a final victory in their struggle.

"I would like to announce to our sons and daughters and to entire world the following news; the news of the end of tyranny and dictatorship in Libya that [will] never return again," Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, the vice chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC), told reporters in Benghazi on Thursday evening.

"Our revolutionaries managed to get the head of the tyrant, who has met his fate and destiny like all dictators and tyrants."

Ghoga's announcement had been preceded by uncertainty. As NTC fighters in Sirte and officials in Tripoli began to tell reporters the news of Gaddafi's capture, then of his death, memories of previous false rumours arose.

Most recently, the NTC falsely claimed that Muatassim Gaddafi, one of the leader's sons and his former national security advisor, had been arrested in Sirte.

"My friends said, 'Yeah, Sirte has been liberated,' and then we heard the news about Gaddafi, we thought it was a scandal lika Muatassim, so we were relaxed until lunch time," Lutfi Ben Hamid, a computer engineer in Tripoli, told Al Jazeera. "Then we saw the pictures."

Following second by second

At Hamid's daughter's school, teachers ululated in celebration. He ran back home to turn on the television and sat down to watch with his wife, an Irish woman he married while studying in the country and brought back to Libya, finally in 1992, to live.

Video of Gaddafi lying dead on the pavement, apparently shot in the head, began to spread. Crowds in Tripoli gathered in Martyrs' Square, cargo ships in the port began to sound their horns, and NTC fighters and armed civilians began firing their weapons in the air.

"When they put the image on the TV and on the internet, I was following second by second, until that time I didn't believe it, because it could be [done by] Photoshop, but then they showed the film," said Younis Fenadi, a climate researcher at the Libyan National Meteorological Center. "We are celebrating it."

After the confirmation, debate quickly began over the manner of Gaddafi's death. Various accounts said he had been pulled from a drainage pipe, injured during a firefight involving a large convoy of cars, or hit by a NATO air strike. But video appeared to show Gaddafi being arrested by NTC fighters while alive and later lying dead, with a large wound on the side of his head.

A bloody but welcomed end

"I'm happy the way they caught him," Hamid said. "Because I know there [are] some supporters here, and by capturing him alive, there's even a chance for his supporters to get him."

Fenadi, who had planned with his family to celebrate his daughter's birthday with a picnic outdoors, found himself discussing Gaddafi's death with her instead.

Gaddafi's final moments

"I was very, very happy. My daughter and wife, they preferred that they capture him and bring him to justice, but I prefer him to be killed and end this chapter of his regime in this country," Fenadi said. "Now it will take just a few weeks and Gaddafi will be in the past."

Fenadi said that lower-ranking members of the regime will feel more free to reveal what occurred under Gaddafi now that he is dead. He also said he wants to see Saif al-Islam, his most prominent son, and Abdullah al-Senussi, his military intelligence chief, arrested.

Still waiting for answers

In Martyrs' Square, celebrators expressed disbelief over the fate of the man who had ruled their country for so long and whose security apparatus was ascribed nearly fearful abilities to squelch the slightest show of dissent.

"It's better killed, if he's captured then we will have different opinions," one woman told Al Jazeera's James Bays. "We don't care about the secrets any more ... as long as we get rid of him, we are free now."

Fenadi, who was born in Tripoli in 1961, eight years before Gaddafi took power, said Libyans will in time, through recovered documents and others' testimony, get answers to the questions over massacres and kidnapped loved ones that have plagued the country for 41 years.

"I am glad that I get a chance, I am 52 years old now, to speak freely in my country," he said.

But some expressed concern for the future of Libya under the NTC's main leaders, Mahmoud Jibril, the controversial NTC prime minister, and Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the NTC chairman who has promised to resign upon the declaration of liberation.

'We need a strong government'

"I don't like the guy, I think he's another Gaddafi," Hamid said, as calls from nearby mosques and the screech of celebrating cars could be heard around him. "He came out and he pretended he's the only one smart enough to run Libya."

Those who aspire to autocratic power in post-Gaddafi Libya would be removed just as he was, Hamid said.

Others feared continued violence in a country now heavy armed after months of conflict.

On Wednesday in the eastern Tripoli neighbourhood Tajoura, NTC fighters on pickup trucks with mounted anti-aircraft guns became involved in a chase with another man in a car who had opened fire on them, apparently fearing they were following him, according to Toshani Gabgoub, a resident who has worked for Al Jazeera.

The two sides exchanged fire, and one NTC fighter was injured.

"We need a strong government," Gabgoub said, if there is any hope to restore calm to Libya.