Colonel Moammar Gaddafi ruled the North African country with a strong grip for more than four decades. He was repeatedly accused by leaders in the West of supporting terrorism, not least of which included the bombing of a U.S commercial passenger airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.
On Thursday, mobile phone footage showed the bloody body of a man purported to be Gaddafi laying on the ground. The Prime Minister of the interim-government, known as the National Transition Council (NTC), confirmed the man to be Gaddafi, noting that the 69 year-old had indeed been killed.
If he died, it is unclear exactly how. An NTC spokesman said he was injured in an attack and was being driven to Misrata when he died of his wounds. “Who dun it?” matters a great deal. If it is seen domestically in Libya that NATO was directly responsible, then his death will be viewed as a bittersweet victory.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is in Afghanistan one day after a surprise visit to Libya, was handed a blackberry which presumably noted that Gaddafi had been killed. She reportedly responded by saying, “Wow.”
The NTC will now inherit 33 billion dollars in assets that belonging to the Gaddafi government but were frozen by the West. They may be asked to pay back some one billion dollars to NATO for its supporting offensive, but that still leaves lots of money as a handsome reward.