By about 12:30 p.m. local time on Thursday, the ousted Libyan ruler would be dead, his blood-splotched remains later dragged across the unforgiving ground as his jubilant adversaries fired their rifles into the air, dispensing with any semblance of pomp or dignity.
“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time,” Libyan Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril announced later in the day, confirming the rumours already swirling throughout Libya and across the global village via Twitter, Facebook and Skype. “Moammar Gadhafi has been killed.”
As a result, the combat phase of the Libyan revolution has ended, and the hard part can begin — the construction of democracy and the rule of law in a clan-based land of scattered fiefdoms and regional jealousies, a country with little experience of government other than despotism and folly.
But, now, at least Gadhafi is gone.
What follows is the chronicle — as nearly as it can be determined so soon after the events — of the final few hours of the dictator’s life, a time of bombardment, confusion, and panic, as well as victory and joy.
Gadhafi may have ruled as a cunning madman, for 42 long and dismal years, but he died like a cornered beast, with nowhere to run.
His final day on earth began in District 2, a prosperous residential neighbourhood in Sirte, the city of his birth and the refuge he clung to after Tripoli fell to advancing rebels almost two months ago.
Since then, Gadhafi’s whereabouts had been a mystery. Different rumours put him in the southern Libyan town of Sabha, Niger’s city of Agadez, the desert outpost of Bani Walid, a bunker somewhere beneath Tripoli, or — as turned out to be true — in Sirte.
On the last day of his life, it is unlikely Gadhafi had much time or inclination for breakfast — which, in Libya, can be as simple as a few fresh dates and a glass of milk or as elaborate as chakchouka, a popular concoction of fried eggs, tomatoes, and chili peppers, usually eaten with pita bred.
But Gadhafi was under the gun.
For the past two weeks, anti-Gadhafi fighters — troops associated with the National Transitional Council — had been waging a determined offensive to take Sirte, the final bastion against the armed uprising that began in eastern Libya last February.
By early this week, they had succeeded in ousting pro-Gadhafi soldiers from their fortified compounds in the centre of Sirte, confining them to an area of a few hundred square metres in the northwestern reaches of town.
Early on Thursday, the attackers closed in for the kill. By all accounts, the battle was ferocious, lasting 90 minutes and claiming many lives — including that of Mutassim, Gadhafi’s playboy son.
With their backs to the sea, Gadhafi and his last desperate cronies decided there was no choice but to run.
In an armoured convoy, the remnants of the Libyan old guard fled Sirte, heading more or less in the direction of Misurata, located 140 kilometres to the west.
They did not get far.
NATO warplanes attacked the convoy just three or four kilometres west of Sirte and Moammar Gadhafi’s remaining sojourn on earth was reduced from hours to minutes. A NATO official said the convoy was hit either by a French plane or a U.S. Predator drone.
The 69-year-old despot fled on foot, it seems, and here the story gets jumbled.
By one account, Gadhafi — possibly already wounded in both legs — sought shelter by clambering into one of two adjoining concrete drain pipes that ran beneath the road.
The former ruler may have been alone or accompanied by bodyguards. One photo of the scene, taken later, shows an unidentified corpse sprawled by one of the drains.
A curly-haired man in civilian dress told reporters he witnessed the tyrant’s death. Gadhafi’s last words, he said, were “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
But someone did shoot, hitting Gadhafi in the abdomen, it was said, apparently with a single bullet from a 9-millimetre pistol.
The curly-haired man says he himself beat the wounded Gadhafi with a shoe, a gross insult among Arabs.
Another young man, in a New York Yankees cap, held aloft a gold-plated pistol that he said he had taken from Gadhafi himself.
Another of Gadhafi’s sons, Seif al-Islam, was reported to be aboard the convoy of vehicles fleeing Sirte, but his fate was uncertain late Thursday.
By some accounts, Gadhafi died a short time later, while being borne toward Misurata in a makeshift ambulance — really just a truck.
A crude cellphone video that surfaced on the Internet Thursday depicts a bloodied man resembling Gadhafi being roughly loaded into the back of a truck, where he seems to be struggling to speak.
Accounts differ about what happened next, but Gadhafi did not long survive.
Another video shows the body of a man, apparently dead and resembling Gadhafi, being dragged across the ground in a scene of chaos.
Another video shows the body of a man, apparently dead and resembling Gadhafi, being dragged across the ground in a scene of chaos.
In what appeared to contradict the events depicted in the video, the National Transitional Council offered a different account later Thursday, saying Gadhafi was killed when a gunfight broke out after his capture between his supporters and government fighters. He died from a bullet wound to the head, the prime minister said.
The NTC said no order had been given to kill him.
“He was bleeding from his stomach,” NTC official Abdel Majid Mlegta said. “It took a long time to transport him. He bled to death (in the ambulance).”
But another NTC official said the group’s fighters “beat him very harshly and then they killed him. This is a war.”
By 1 p.m. local time, about 6 a.m. in Toronto, Libyan TV was reporting Gadhafi’s death.
Half an hour later, NTC commander Abdel-Basit Haroun confirmed the report, and British Prime Minister David Cameron was soon marking the occasion by paying tribute to the “many, many Libyans who died at the hands of this brutal dictator and his regime.”
Now the dictator is dead — and, for Libya, the hard part begins.
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