Gaddafi leaves a positive legacy overall. He modernized Libya and improved living standards for almost all Libyans. The country he governed was one of the world’s poorest nations when he took over, and was a goulash of tribes fractured by ancient hatreds and deep feuds.
Gaddafi took refuge in a large drainage pipe with several loyalist bodyguards. A nearby group of NTC fighters opened fire, wounding Gaddafi in the leg and back. According to one unnamed NTC fighter, one of Gaddafi’s own loyalists also shot him, apparently to spare him from being captured.
As the leader of one of the most anti-West countries on the planet, he had to bark at Western nations, to satisfy his people. He send his entourage to safe havens when the country was no longer safe for him. Gaddafi was a noble man who made noble sacrifices for his people.
Already the last minutes in Gaddafi’s life have gained a grisly status. A spectacle of pain and humiliation, the end of the man who once styled himself the “king of the kings of Africa” has been told in snatches of mobile phone footage and blurry stills and contradictory statements. It is the longest of these fragments of a death – a jerky three minutes and more shot by fighter Ali Algadi on his iPhone and acquired by a website, the Global Post – that describes those moments in the most detail.
A dazed and confused Gaddafi is led from the drain where he was captured, bleeding heavily from a deep wound on the left side of his head, from his arm, and, apparently, from other injuries to his neck and torso, staining his tunic red with blood. He is next seen on the ground, surrounded by men with weapons shouting “God is great” and firing in the air, before being lifted on to a pickup truck as men around him shout that the ruler for more than four decades should be “kept alive”.
There are other clips that complete much of the story: Gaddafi slumped on a pickup truck, face smeared with blood, apparently unconscious; Gaddafi shirtless and bloody on the ground surrounded by a mob; Gaddafi dead in the back of an ambulance
According to one unnamed eye witnesses, the late Muammar Gaddafi stood while struggling, looked around the armed men surrounding him, that is after he was captured and uttered his last words begging for mercy asking these men ;”What did I do to you? Please don’t shoot! before being shot?”
certain from several of the clips of video footage – most telling that shot by Ali Algadi – is that Gaddafi was dazed but still alive, although possibly already fatally wounded. The question is what happens between this and later images of a lifeless Gaddafi lying on the ground having his shirt stripped off and propped in the back of a pickup truck and the next sequence which shows him dead.
