Back to previous page  Post Most  Moammar Gaddafi killed: For
longtime autocrat, a violent end  By Caryle Murphy and ,  For
more than 40 years, Col. Moammar Gaddafi was the eccentric,
unpredictable and brutal face of Libya, an oil-rich country that
became an international pariah. Defiant to the last, he was
killed Thursday in Sirte, his home town, eight months after he
vowed to die rather than concede defeat to a popular uprising.
It was an ignominious end for Col. Gaddafi, who had managed in
his waning years to rehabilitate himself in foreign eyes but
then left even supporters appalled and sickened as he unleashed
his army against his people in what proved to be a doomed effort
to suppress this year’s revolution.  Deposed in August when
rebel forces won control of the capital, he was killed in
crossfire in Sirte, his loyalists’ last redoubt, after being
dragged alive from a sewer culvert where he had taken refuge,
said Mahmoud Jibril, the rebel leader who is Libya’s interim
prime minister.  He became the fi