Reuters/Misrata, Libya
Libya’s interim prime minister said he was resigning yesterday and urged new leaders to seize a “very limited opportunity” and resolve rivalries now surfacing after Muammar Gaddafi’s death. With regional differences emerging about what to do with Gaddafi’s still unburied body, the formal end to the war and the carve-up of power, Libya’s outgoing premier said the coming days posed a crucial test of resolve for the new men in power. Mahmoud Jibril said he would step down after seven months as prime minister of the Western-backed rebel government now that the legal declaration of “liberation” was expected today following Gaddafi’s killing on Thursday. But in a parting shot at an international business forum in Jordan, he warned Libyans to avoid infighting if Libyans were to keep to a plan to hold their first free election next year. Leaders required “resolve”, he said, “in the next few days”. In Misrata, the curious and the relieved filed for a second day through a market cold store to view the body of Gaddafi, whose surprise capture and killing in his hometown of Sirte sparked joy - and renewed jockeying for post-war influence. Visitors wore surgical masks against the stench, an image that may trouble some Muslims, for whom swift burial is a holy duty - even if few Libyans share the unease among their Western allies over what some believe was a summary execution. Jibril said progress for Libya would need great resolution, both by interim leaders on the National Transitional Council and by 6mn war-weary people: “First,” he said, “What kind of resolve the NTC will show in the next few days? “And the other thing depends mainly on the Libyan people - whether they differentiate between the past and the future.” He added: “I am counting on them to look ahead and remember the kind of agony they went through in the last 42 years. “We need to seize this very limited opportunity.” The formal declaration of an end to war and of “liberation” from Gaddafi’s rule was expected to be made by NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil today in the eastern city of Benghazi, the seat of the revolt inspired by the fall of autocrats in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt. There have been several delays to the announcement. It will set a clock ticking on a plan for a new government and constitutional assembly leading to full democracy in 2013. Jibril reaffirmed the plan was for elections to the body that will draft a constitution to be held in eight months. Gaddafi’s body remained in Misrata, bearing wounds assumed to have been inflicted by fighters from the city who hauled him from a drain in his hometown Sirte. A field commander in Misrata worried that trouble was brewing: “The fear now is what is going to happen next,” he said, speaking to Reuters privately, as ordinary Libyans, some taking pictures for family albums, filed in under armed guard to see for themselves that the man they feared was truly dead. “There is going to be regional infighting. You have Zintan and Misrata on one side and then Benghazi and the east,” the guerrilla said. “There is infighting even inside the army.” Comparisons with Iraq after Saddam Hussain are tempered by the absence of the Sunni-Shia divide which ravaged that country. However, as in Iraq, there are vast energy resources at stake and international powers keen to exploit them. Regional enmities thrive, as well as differences between Islamists and secularists and among those who once served Gaddafi - like NTC head Abdel Jalil - and others. There is also ethnic tension between Arabs and Berbers. Gaddafi’s surviving family, in exile, have asked that his body and that of his son Mutassim be handed over to tribal kinsmen from Sirte. NTC officials said they were trying to arrange a secret resting place to avoid loyalist supporters making it a shrine. Unlike on Friday, Gaddafi’s body was covered by a blanket that left only his head exposed, hiding bruises on his torso and scratch marks on his chest that had earlier been visible. A Reuters reporter who viewed the body said Gaddafi’s head had been turned to the left. That hid a bullet hole that earlier could be seen on the left side of his face. Gaddafi’s family and international human rights groups have urged an inquiry into how Gaddafi, 69, was killed, since gory cellphone video footage showed him alive but being beaten and taunted by his captors. Jibril said on the day that Gaddafi was killed in “crossfire” in an ambulance taking him to hospital. But an ambulance driver in Sirte said Gaddafi was already dead by the time he picked him up, and a local military commander in Misrata said “over-enthusiastic” fighters had taken matters into their own hands: “We wanted to keep him alive. But the young guys...,” he said. “Things went out of control.” The International Criminal Court at The Hague had wanted to try Gaddafi for war crimes and may yet be able to try his son Saif al-Islam if he is found. NTC officials believe he escaped from the last redoubt in Sirte, after French jets had scattered a convoy of dozens of vehicles trying to flee with his father. Intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, the third man wanted by the ICC, managed to reach Niger, officials have said. Libyans also want to try some of the old guard at home. Despite the qualms of some abroad, few compatriots are troubled by Gaddafi’s bloody end, captured in clips of cellphone video broadcast around the world. “People in the West don’t understand the agony and pain that the people went through during the past 42 years,” said Jibril, who added he felt “reborn” when he heard the news. Abdulatif, a pilot, who came to see the body in Misrata, asked: “What would he tell the mother whose children were killed or the girls who were raped? If he lived and was killed a thousand times that would still only be a trifle.” Nonetheless, some Libyans have expressed unease at the way Gaddafi’s body has been treated - Muslim custom dictates it should have been buried by sundown on Thursday - and at other matters of religion and respect for the dead. Gaddafi’s daughter Aisha, her mother and two of her brothers fled to Algeria after the fall of Tripoli. Aisha gave birth on the day she arrived. The government in Algiers has angered the NTC by refusing to send them back. But an Algerian newspaper yesterday quoted official sources saying that, following the death of the head of the family, they might now reconsider.
Leader spirited over $200bn out of country: reportMuammar Gaddafi secretly spirited out of Libya and invested overseas more than $200bn—double the amount that Western governments previously had suspected, The Los Angeles Times reported late Friday. Citing unnamed senior Libyan officials, the newspaper said US administration officials were stunned last spring when they found $37bn in Libyan regime accounts and investments in the US. They quickly froze the assets before Gaddafi or his aides could move them, the report said. Governments in France, Italy, England and Germany seized control of another $30bn or so. Earlier, investigators estimated that Gaddafi had stashed perhaps another $30bn elsewhere in the world, for a total of about $100bn, the paper noted. But subsequent investigations by US, European and Libyan authorities determined that Gaddafi secretly sent tens of billions more abroad over the years and made sometimes lucrative investments in nearly every major country, including much of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, The Times said.