The Final 24 Hours of Muammar Gaddafi: From a Sirte Hideout to a Misrata Freezer
At dawn on Thursday 20 October 2011 the man who'd ruled Libya for 42 years was sitting in an abandoned house in a bombed-out neighbourhood of his home town, waiting for a convoy that was running late. There was no electricity. There was no running water. There was barely any food. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the self-styled Brother Leader who'd once pitched a Bedouin tent in the gardens of world capitals, had been reduced to making tea on a coal stove while the city around him was pounded flat.
By lunchtime he'd be dragged bleeding out of a concrete drainage pipe. By the afternoon he'd be dead. And by the weekend his body would be lying on a foam mattress in a vegetable freezer at the back of a shopping centre, with families queuing round the block to have their photos taken with it. This is the story of how it all happened, hour by hour, and why the official version of his death still doesn't add up.
Quick Answers
When did Gaddafi die? On 20 October 2011, a few hours after being captured outside Sirte, Libya.
Where was he found? Hiding in a drainage pipe under a main road on the western edge of Sirte, after NATO aircraft hit his escaping convoy.
How did he die? Officially he was killed in crossfire. Video evidence and a 2012 Human Rights Watch investigation point strongly towards him being killed in custody, but no autopsy has ever been published.
What happened to his son Mutassim? He was captured alive, filmed smoking and drinking water, then turned up dead later the same day with a fresh wound to his throat.
Where is Gaddafi buried? Nobody outside a small circle knows. He was buried at dawn on 25 October 2011 in a secret desert grave, and the location has never been revealed.
A Dictator on the Run in His Own Home Town
To understand how Gaddafi ended up in that pipe, you have to rewind to the summer. The uprising that started in Benghazi in February 2011 had turned into a full civil war, backed from March by NATO airstrikes under a UN mandate to protect civilians. When Tripoli fell in late August, Gaddafi didn't head for the Algerian border or a friendly African capital. He went home to Sirte, the coastal city he'd lavished with money and conference halls, close to the desert village where he'd been born in 1942.
He arrived with a tiny entourage. Human Rights Watch's investigation lists the core group as Mansour Dhao, head of the People's Guard, Ezzedin al-Hanshiri, the head of his personal guard, his personal driver Hamad Massoud and a handful of bodyguards. His son Mutassim, a former national security adviser, took command of Sirte's defence. He didn't live with his father, but he visited regularly.
Over the following weeks the anti-Gaddafi militias, many of them from the battered city of Misrata, tightened the noose. Gaddafi's group kept shifting between empty houses to dodge mortars, Grad rockets and NATO jets. Dhao later told investigators, "We moved places every four or five days, depending on the circumstances." Eventually the whole loyalist enclave shrank to a single residential area on the western outskirts known as District Two.
Tea, the Koran and a Man Who Thought Libya Still Loved Him
Most of what we know about Gaddafi's state of mind in those final weeks comes from Dhao, who survived the end and was interviewed in a Misrata detention centre by Human Rights Watch, the New York Times, the Associated Press and Arab television. His picture of the Brother Leader is a long way from the swaggering showman of the 1980s.
Gaddafi wasn't directing the fighting. That was Mutassim's job. The old man spent his days reading the Koran and praying, scribbling notes and brewing tea. The group lived mostly on pasta and rice, there was no doctor and no medicine, and there was no television or news. That last one seems to have got to him the most. He'd rage about the lack of power and water, and according to Dhao he was by turns furious and bewildered. Dhao told reporters that mostly, he was just sad and angry.
The really striking thing is how detached he'd become. Even after being told Tripoli had fallen, Gaddafi apparently still believed ordinary Libyans loved him. Aides repeatedly begged him to step down or slip out of the country. He refused, saying he wanted to die in the land of his ancestors. Mutassim backed him. The loyalist force in Sirte had dwindled from around 350 fighters to about 150 as men melted away, and the audio messages that occasionally reached the outside world were being sent out on a Thuraya satellite phone.
The Last Night in District Two
By mid October it was obvious District Two couldn't hold. Militias were closing in from several directions and the shelling was constant. According to Human Rights Watch, it was Mutassim who finally decided the position was hopeless and organised a breakout.
The plan was to leave in the dark, at around 3.30 or 4am on 20 October, and punch through the encirclement before the militias were fully awake. It was a big, messy operation. The convoy wasn't just armed loyalists. It carried wounded fighters from an improvised field clinic in District Two, along with civilians, including women. Estimates of its size vary depending on who you ask. Human Rights Watch put it at roughly 250 people in around 50 heavily loaded pickups and 4x4s, many mounted with machine guns or anti-aircraft guns. Dhao spoke of more than 40 cars, while other accounts go as high as 75 vehicles.
Loading the wounded and gathering everyone together took hours longer than planned. That delay, almost certainly fatal, meant the convoy didn't roll until about 8am, by which time many of the militia fighters were back at their posts in daylight. Gaddafi climbed into a Toyota Land Cruiser with Dhao, his security chief, a relative and the driver. Dhao said he barely spoke on the drive.
8am: The Convoy Breaks Out
The column first tried to sneak west along the coast through the residential streets, then swung onto a main road heading south out of the city. It didn't get far. About half an hour after setting off it was spotted from the air.
NATO had been watching Sirte for weeks, and an RAF E-3D AWACS surveillance plane reportedly called in a French Mirage 2000D. Its first strike damaged or destroyed a couple of armed vehicles and several cars. Then a US Predator drone fired Hellfire missiles, destroying another vehicle and scattering the rest. The Pentagon confirmed the drone's role the same day. France's defence minister Gérard Longuet later described the first French action as a warning shot to stop the column moving.
Inside Gaddafi's Land Cruiser, a missile landed close enough to set off the airbags. Dhao was hit by shrapnel. The convoy veered off onto dirt tracks west of the main road and blundered straight into a Misrata militia base. A firefight broke out, and with the convoy pinned in place, NATO jets came back. Two 500 lb GBU-12 laser guided bombs, set to burst low over the vehicles, tore through the column. Ammunition in the trucks went up in secondary explosions.
When Human Rights Watch reached the strike site the next day, they counted 53 bodies and 14 destroyed vehicles. Twenty eight of the dead were burned beyond recognition. Across the whole battle scene, investigators found at least 103 bodies. NATO said it had no idea Gaddafi was in the convoy and stuck to its line that it didn't target individuals.
The Villa, the Pipe and the Grenade
The survivors scattered. Gaddafi and his inner circle ran for an abandoned villa compound nearby while militia anti-aircraft guns and mortars hammered the area. Younis Abu Bakr Younis, son of the defence minister Abu Bakr Younis Jabr, later told investigators he found Gaddafi in a guardhouse, wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest and carrying a handgun and an automatic rifle. He was 69 years old.
Mutassim, wounded and riding near the front when the bombs hit, left his father with somewhere between eight and 12 fighters to try and force a way out. He promised he'd find them a route. Father and son never saw each other alive again.
With the villa getting shot to pieces, Dhao suggested making a run for a large drainage pipe that ran under the main road about 100 metres away. Gaddafi, Dhao, the defence minister, his two sons and six or seven bodyguards crawled through it to the western side of the road. Militiamen spotted them almost straight away.
What happened next is the strangest twist of the whole day. As the bodyguards traded fire with fighters on the road above, one of them started lobbing grenades up the embankment. According to the defence minister's son, the third grenade hit the concrete wall and bounced back, landing between Gaddafi and Abu Bakr Younis. A guard tried to grab it and throw it again. It went off. The blast killed Abu Bakr Younis outright, despite his flak jacket and helmet, and sprayed shrapnel into the left side of Gaddafi's head. The wound that left him streaming with blood in the videos that followed was, in all likelihood, caused by his own side. Dhao was hit again, blacked out and woke up in hospital, which is why he could never say what happened to his leader next.
"Do You Know Right From Wrong?"
By around midday the fighters had Gaddafi. One of them, Omran Shaaban, a Misrata fighter barely out of his teens, would later be hailed in Misrata as the man who pulled him out of the pipe. Another young fighter appeared outside a Sirte hospital that afternoon waving what he said was Gaddafi's golden pistol. A third, Mohammed Shaban, told reporters "His blood is on my shirt. I'll never wash it."
The phone footage that leaked out over the following days is grim. In roughly three and a half minutes of raw video, a dazed and bloodied Gaddafi is shoved, punched and pulled by the hair while crowds shout "Allahu Akbar" and "Misrata!" A militiaman appears to stab him in the buttocks with a bayonet as he's dragged towards the road. A frame-by-frame analysis of the footage by GlobalPost went further, concluding he was sexually assaulted with an object, though it couldn't say for sure whether that was a knife or a stick. A militia commander, Khalid Ahmed Raid, later admitted to investigators that the situation was completely out of control.
Gaddafi's own words in those minutes are hard to pin down, and different clips have been translated in different ways. In one widely reported video he tells the men around him that what they're doing is forbidden in Islam and asks them, "Do you know right from wrong?" Other accounts have him pleading not to be shot. Either way, the man who'd spent February 2011 promising to hunt down the rebels house by house was now begging for mercy from them.
How Did Gaddafi Actually Die?
This is the part of the story that has never been settled. Within hours, Libya's interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril was telling the world Gaddafi had been captured in good health and then fatally shot in the head in crossfire between his supporters and the rebels as he was moved to a vehicle. A field commander gave a different version, saying he'd been shot in the leg and shoulder after capture. A group of fighters from Benghazi later claimed they'd shot him during a row over where he should be taken. None of those versions has ever been proved.
What the videos do show is that Gaddafi was alive when he was seized and that, by the time his half naked body was being loaded into an ambulance, he looked lifeless. It's at least a two hour drive to Misrata, and Human Rights Watch concluded he was almost certainly dead before he arrived. Raid himself told investigators that Gaddafi had been alive when he first saw him and must have been shot later.
Gaddafi's body (GRAPHIC)
Libya's chief forensic pathologist, Dr Othman al-Zintani, carried out an autopsy a couple of days later and initially told the press the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. But the full results have never been released, not even to the UN commission that investigated the war. Human Rights Watch noticed something else, too. There was no obvious exit wound on the visible parts of his head, and the presumed entry wound sat on top of the shrapnel wound from that bouncing grenade. In other words, nobody outside a Misrata mortuary really knows what killed him.
Mutassim's Final Hours
If Gaddafi's death is murky, his son's is barely murky at all. Mutassim was captured alive while trying to break through the siege lines with his guards, wounded in the upper chest. One video shows him sitting on the back of a pickup. Another, filmed by a militia called the Lions of the Valley, shows him lying on a bed in Misrata, being offered water and cigarettes while his captors taunt and threaten him. Pointing at his injuries, he tells them these were his medals.
Mutassim in captivity and his body (GRAPHIC)
That same afternoon Libyan television showed Mutassim's body on a hospital stretcher. When Human Rights Watch examined it the next day, it had a large wound to the throat and a gash across the lower stomach, neither of which appeared in the footage of him alive. The organisation concluded he was very likely killed in custody.
The Bodies on the Hotel Lawn
The killing didn't stop with the Gaddafis. Somewhere around 140 to 150 members of the convoy were captured alive that day. Many of them never made it out of Sirte.
A few hundred metres from where Gaddafi was caught sat the Mahari Hotel. On 21 October the bodies of at least 66 people were found there. When Human Rights Watch visited two days later, 53 decomposing bodies were still lying on the sea-view lawn, some with their hands tied behind their backs, surrounded by spent AK-47 and FAL cartridge cases. A seven minute phone video showed 29 captives being beaten and abused outside a militia compound. At least a dozen of them later turned up among the dead at the hotel.
One of them was Ahmed Ali Yusuf al-Ghariyani, a 29-year-old navy recruit from Tawergha, a town despised by Misrata's fighters. He'd been filmed being kicked and pelted with shoes. He was buried as unidentified body number 86 and only named later when his family recognised him in hospital photographs. Among the other named dead was one of Gaddafi's own nephews. Libya's new authorities never announced any investigation into the Mahari killings.
A Vegetable Freezer in Misrata
Gaddafi's body wasn't taken to Tripoli. Jibril worried that bringing it to the capital could stir up anger and bitterness and make any funeral impossible to control. So it went to Misrata instead, the city that had survived a brutal months-long siege by his forces and whose fighters had led the assault on Sirte. Nobody there was in a forgiving mood.
The body ended up in a commercial cold room at a shopping centre, normally used to store vegetables and onions. It lay on a thin mattress on the floor, stripped to the waist, with dried blood on his torso and visible wounds to his chest, abdomen and the left side of his head. Mutassim and Abu Bakr Younis were laid out beside him. A dentist was brought in to compare his teeth with his dental records.
The plan had been to keep the location secret. That didn't last long. Long queues formed outside, and guards ended up organising separate viewing times for families and for single men. Men, women and children filed in to have their photos taken with the corpse. Some chanted that they wanted to see the dog. One unemployed 37-year-old told the Associated Press simply, "I felt joy." By sunset on the first day, the freezer had become the biggest attraction in town.
If that sounds familiar, it's because history keeps doing this to fallen strongmen. The Romanians filmed the summary execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu on Christmas Day 1989 and broadcast the bodies to the nation. The Bolivian army laid out Che Guevara's corpse in a hospital laundry for the press in 1967. The point, every time, is the same. People need to see it to believe it's over.
A Secret Grave in the Desert
Islamic tradition calls for a burial within a day, but Gaddafi's took five. His tribe, the Qadhadhfa, wanted the bodies handed over for burial in Sirte, which is what Gaddafi himself had reportedly asked for in his will. The National Transitional Council refused. Its leaders didn't want a grave that could turn into a shrine for loyalists, and Libya's fatwa office muddied things further by reportedly ruling he wasn't a Muslim and so didn't deserve an Islamic funeral at all.
By Monday 24 October, after four days on show, the bodies had started to decompose and the viewings were stopped. Late that night, AP journalists watched three vehicles leave the market and found the freezer empty afterwards. A local security guard told reporters he had no idea whether they'd been buried or not.
They had. At about 5am on Tuesday 25 October, Gaddafi, Mutassim and Abu Bakr Younis were buried in unmarked graves somewhere in the desert outside Misrata. A few relatives were allowed to pray over the bodies, and one of Gaddafi's nephews read the prayer. Then they were driven away.
The location has never been revealed. In 2018 a fresh row broke out in Libya when relatives and tribal elders demanded to know where he was. A former Libyan ambassador admitted nobody knew where the grave was, and family graves in Sirte had already been vandalised. As far as anyone has been able to establish, it's still a secret today.
What Happened to the Men Who Caught Him
For a while, Omran Shaaban was a hero in Misrata. Then, in July 2012, he and some friends were ambushed and kidnapped near the old Gaddafi stronghold of Bani Walid. He was shot twice and left paralysed from the waist down. When Libya's president finally negotiated his release that September, his brother described him as skin and bones. He was flown to a hospital in France and died there on 25 September 2012, aged just 22. He'd reportedly never received the $800,000 bounty that had been on Gaddafi's head.
Thousands turned out for his memorial at a Misrata sports stadium. Within weeks, militias from Misrata were besieging Bani Walid. The killing that started in a Sirte drainpipe hadn't so much ended a war as opened the next one.
"We Came, We Saw, He Died"
The world's reaction on 20 October was split between relief and unease. Families of the victims of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, the atrocity Gaddafi's regime eventually admitted responsibility for, had waited decades to see him face justice. Instead he'd died in a ditch before any court could hear the case. The UN's human rights chief and Amnesty International both called for an investigation into how he'd been killed.
In Washington the mood was rather less reflective. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a trip to Afghanistan, was caught on camera reacting to the news with a laugh and a riff on Julius Caesar, "We came, we saw, he died". It's become one of the most quoted lines of the whole intervention, mostly by people who argue that what came next, years of militia rule, rival governments and civil war, made a mockery of the celebration.
Gaddafi joined a long list of strongmen whose endings looked nothing like their reigns. Manuel Noriega was blasted out of a Vatican embassy with rock music, Saddam Hussein ended up in a hole near Tikrit while his sons, including the monstrous Uday Hussein, died in a shootout in Mosul, and the CIA spent decades trying, and sometimes succeeding, to kill dictators it had once tolerated. Gaddafi's version was messier than most. A delayed convoy, a bomb from a jet he never saw, a grenade from his own bodyguard and a mob that had suffered under him for decades. Twenty four hours earlier he'd been drinking tea in a house with no lights, still convinced his people loved him.
Further Reading
If you want the bigger picture of how Libya got from a Benghazi protest to a Sirte drainpipe, Channel 4 News correspondent Lindsey Hilsum's Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution is a brilliant, on the ground account of the war and the regime that came before it. For the full sweep of the 42 years, Alison Pargeter's Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi is a sharp, readable history of the man himself.
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Sources
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Human Rights Watch, Libya: New Proof of Mass Killings at Gaddafi Death Site, 17 October 2012
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