Gaddafi death site and attack fields of Sirte

By Peter Bouckaert

Following the Nato bombing strike on Muammar Gaddafi’s convoy, the survivors scattered. The Libyan leader and his inner circle, all of whom survived, took shelter in a nearby abandoned villa compound.

They soon came under heavy fire from militia fighters nearby, who fired on the villa with anti-aircraft guns and mortars. Eyewitness Younis Abu Bakr Younis, one of the sons of Gaddafi’s defence minister, described what happened to HRW when interviewed in private in January at a Misrata detention facility:

“[After the Nato strike], people tried to take shelter in two neighbouring buildings. We saw Mutassim (Gaddafi) injured there. He had been at the front of the convoy when it was hit. At the entry of the villa compound, there was a guardhouse, and we found Muammar there, wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. He had a handgun in his pocket and was carrying an automatic weapon. (Head of the People’s Guard) Mansour Dhao came and took my father and Muammar into the other house. We stayed there for just a couple minutes. Mansour left and came back, saying all the cars had been destroyed. Then the villa started being shelled so we ran out of there. There were a lot of cement construction blocks outside and we hid among those, with the families and the guards.”

Radical decision

Younis Abu Bakr Younis went on to say that during their brief stay at the villa, Mutassim Gaddafi made the decision to try and open the road with a group of eight to 12 fighters, and left, telling his father: “I will try and find you a way out of here.”

A second witness interviewed by HRW confirmed this account. As Muammar Gaddafi and the remaining members of the inner circle were pinned down at the cement construction blocks outside the villas, Mansour Dhao suggested that they run towards a drainage pipe under the main road about 100 meters away, and attempt to reach another series of farms across the road.

Muammar Gaddafi, accompanied by Dhao, Defence minister Abu Bakr Younis, the minister’s two sons, and about six or seven bodyguards ran across an open field, and crawled through the drainage pipe towards the opposite (western) side of the north-south road. When they emerged at the opposite side, militia fighters spotted them almost immediately.

Inner circles

As Muammar Gaddafi and his inner circle sheltered at the end of the drainage pipes, his bodyguards battled the militiamen above them on the road. As the militia fighters reached the part of the road above the drainage pipe, one of the bodyguards threw several grenades at the militiamen located right above them. According to Younis Abu Bakr Younis, who was present at the scene, one of those grenades injured Gaddafi and members of his entourage:

“The guards threw grenades up towards the road, but the third grenade hit the concrete wall and bounced back to fall between Muammar Gaddafi and Abu Bakr Younis. The guard tried to get the grenade and throw it again, but it exploded and he lost part of his arm. The shrapnel hit my father and he fell down to the ground. The grenade also injured Muammar Gaddafi on the left side of his head. I ran towards my father, but he didn’t answer when I asked him if he was okay. I saw Muammar bleeding, and Mansour was also lying on the ground – the guard was dead.” Abu Bakr Younis, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet, died at the scene from shrapnel injuries, according to his two sons and video evidence reviewed by HRW.

Groups of militia fighters immediately descended from the main road after the grenade explosion and captured the badly bleeding Muammar Gaddafi.

The presence of Muammar Gaddafi in the fleeing convoy surprised the militia fighters, who, like most people in Sirte at the time, including a HRW team, had no inkling that he had been present in Sirte until the moment of his capture.

Raw, unedited cell phone footage documents the three minutes and 38 seconds following Muammar Gaddafi’s capture. As soon as the militia fighters had custody of Gaddafi, they began abusing him. Blood was already gushing from the shrapnel wound in his head. As he was being led onto the main road, a militiaman stabbed him in his anus with what appears to have been a bayonet, causing another rapidly bleeding wound. Misrata militia fighters surrounded Gaddafi, punching and beating him, and yelling “Allahu Akbar!” and “Misrata!” over and over again.

In an interview with HRW, Khalid Ahmed Raid, the commander of the Eastern Coast militia brigade of Misrata, which was based near the scene of the battle and capture, acknowledged that the situation was out of control:

“One of the groups of rebels was sweeping the area when they found Gaddafi, who was accompanied by about 15 fighters. One person from their group came out and asked for help, saying they had some wounded persons. Abu Bakr Younis, Mansour Dhao and Abd al-Nabi Dhao were with Gaddafi. Younis was dying. Dhao survived, he was brought to our base alive... He walked on his own when he was brought here...

“When we captured Gaddafi, the situation was a mess. There were very many fighters around. He was alive when I saw him, so he must have been shot later, not when we saw him here. But it was a violent scene, he was put on the front of a pickup truck that tried to drive him away, and he fell off. It was very chaotic. People were pulling on his hair and hitting him. We understood there needed to be a trial, but we couldn’t control everyone, some acted beyond our control.”

Drove away

The militiamen ultimately put Muammar Gaddafi into an ambulance, and drove him away from the scene to Misrata in a massive convoy. Phone video footage obtained by HRW taken at the scene of his capture appears to show Muammar Gaddafi’s nearly naked and apparently lifeless body being loaded into an ambulance, suggesting that he may have been dead by the time he left the area of his capture.

By the time Muammar Gaddafi arrived in Misrata, a trip of at least two hours, he was almost certainly dead, and images of his body began circulating. There, his body was displayed to the public. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear: some militia fighters from Benghazi claim to have shot Gaddafi dead during a dispute with Misrata fighters about where to take him, but their claims remain unconfirmed.

The bodies of Muammar Gaddafi, Mutassim Gaddafi, and Abu Bakr Younis were ultimately buried in a secret, unmarked desert location, to prevent their burial place from becoming a rallying point for his former loyalists.