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Gadhafi wanted dead or alive

Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2 million bounty on the fallen dictator’s head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled Wednesday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital Tripoli.
Mideast Libya TOPIX
Rebel fighters

TRIPOLI, Libya — Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2 million bounty on the fallen dictator’s head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled Wednesday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital Tripoli.

While pockets of die-hard loyalists kept up the fight to defend Gadhafi, his support was crumbling by the hour, and even his foreign minister said his 42-year rule was over.

Asked by the British broadcaster Channel 4 if a negotiated settlement or safe passage for Gadhafi from Libya were still possible, Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi said: “It looks like things have passed this kind of solution.”

Later, Col. Khalifa Mohammed, Gadhafi’s deputy of intelligence chief, told Al-Arabiya television that he had defected to the rebels.

A defiant Gadhafi vowed from hiding to fight on “until victory or martyrdom,” in an audio message early Wednesday.

Rebel leaders made first moves to extend their political control to the entire country and set up a new government in the capital. During Libya’s six-month civil war, opposition leaders had established their interim administration, the National Transitional Council, in the eastern city of Benghazi, which fell under rebel control shortly after the outbreak of widespread anti-regime protests in February.

“Members of the council are now moving one by one from Benghazi to Tripoli,” said Mansour Seyf al-Nasr, the Libyan opposition’s new ambassador to France.

Still Tripoli was far from pacified, with pro-regime snipers cutting off the road to the airport and other loyalist fighters launching repeated attacks on Gadhafi’s captured private compound. Four Italian journalists were kidnapped on the highway to Tripoli around the city of Zawiya, 30 miles west of the capital.

The city’s streets were largely empty of civilians. Rebels manned checkpoints every few hundred yards, but little else could be seen but the debris of days of fighting and weeks of accumulated garbage.

Intense clashes broke out in the Abu Salim neighbourhood, a regime stronghold next to Gadhafi’s vast Bab al-Aziziya compound, the symbolic centre of his regime, which the rebels captured Tuesday after a fierce battle. Gadhafi loyalists inside Abu Salim were firing into the captured compound, rebels said.

Rebels found no sign of Gadhafi after the Tuesday battle for the compound, but rumours churned of his possible whereabouts. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said there was no evidence to indicate he had left Libya, but rebel officials acknowledged they could not find him.

“He might be in Sirte or any other place,” Jibril said in Paris. Sirte, a coastal city 250 miles from Tripoli, is Gadhafi’s hometown and a bastion of regime support.

Mohammed al-Herizi, an opposition official, said a group of Tripoli businessmen had announced a $2 million reward for the arrest or killing of Gadhafi. But rebel spokesman Col. Ahmed Bani said the rebels themselves had only offered amnesty for anyone who kills him or hands him over.

“The biggest prize is to offer amnesty, not to give money,” he said.

Rebel fighters, who by Wednesday afternoon controlled most of the Bab al-Aziziya compound, were using it as staging area for operations, loading huge trucks with ammunition and discussing deployments. But they repeatedly faced loyalist attacks Wednesday, with pro-Gadhafi snipers firing on the fighters from tall buildings in Abu Salim, said Mohammed Amin, a rebel fighter.