Military commanders in the city of Misrata said yesterday that no post-mortem would be carried out on the body of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi despite concerns over how the ousted strongman died.
“There will be no post-mortem today, nor any day,” Misrata military council spokesman Fathi al-Bashaagha said. “No one is going to open up his body.”
His comments were confirmed by two other Misrata military commanders.
Photo: EPA
Bashaagha said the new regime’s military commander for the capital, Abdelhakim Belhaj, was expected to travel to Misrata later yesterday to view the corpse of the man who ruled Libya with an iron rod for 42 years.
However, he said there were no immediate plan for National Transitional Council chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil to visit.
“Abdel Jajil did not come yesterday and is not coming today, and for the moment it is not expected that he will come,” Bashaagha said.
Qaddafi’s body has been stored in a freezer in a Misrata market since it was brought to the city on Thursday following his death in still unexplained circumstances during the fall of his hometown Sirte.
Overnight, the body of Qaddafi’s son and national security chief, al-Mutassim Billah, who also died during the fall of Sirte, was brought to the same makeshift mortuary and laid out beside him.
Dozens of curious Misrata residents lined up yesterday morning to view the two bloodied bodies laid out on mattresses on the floor.
Abdel Jalil, however, told reporters in Benghazi that Qaddafi’s death was being investigated without any reference to a post-mortem examination.
“Yes,” he answered when asked if the case was being investigated.
He declined to take any further questions during a visit to injured fighters in a hospital.
Meanwhile, despite the confusion over the circumstances in which Qaddafi was killed, a picture of the events is emerging. Faced with suspicions of an execution by a lynch mob, the order that “nobody here killed Qaddafi” has gone around to the fighters who captured alive the former strongman.
Omran Shaaban, 21, said he was the first to locate the man who ruled Libya for four decades in a concrete drainage pipe.
“When I saw him, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t think. I thought: ‘That’s it, Qaddafi is finished,’” he said.
Ahmed Gazal, a comrade, said they had just arrived to join a final assault on Sirte when they ran into a group of survivors from a NATO air strike on a convoy of pro-Qaddafi fighters trying to make an escape.
After a brief exchange of gunfire, they were informed of Qaddafi’s hiding place in the pipe.
“Omran was close to Qaddafi. He grabbed him first, then I said Allahu Akbar [God is great] and I took his legs outside ... When he came out of the pipe, he said: ‘What’s going on, what’s happening?’” Gazal said.
“When I was face to face with him, I thought about all his crimes. I thought he was a big character, but in fact he was just a small mouse,” he said, adding that Qaddafi was bloodied and weak when found.
In the mobile footage, Qaddafi is seen being manhandled by a group of fighters as he is dragged off to the pickup. Shaaban said he was then taken to an ambulance for transfer to Misrata.
A young fighter from the rebel bastion of Benghazi claimed in a video posted on the Internet on Friday that he had captured Qaddafi and shot him twice, fatally wounding him.
“I fired two bullets at him. One hit under his armpit, the other his head. He did not die immediately. It took him half an hour,” said the youth, identified as Sanad al-Sadek al-Ureibi.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of