Osama Swehli is bearded and wears his hair long, tied back in a thick ponytail. A soldier with the National Transitional Council’s fighters in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte, his English is fluent from his time living in west London.
Until the fall of Sirte – Muammar Gaddafi’s home city – Swehli was one of those who listened in to the radio frequencies of the pro-Gaddafi defenders of the besieged city.
Twelve days ago, the Observer encountered Swelhi at a mortar position in Sirte close to the city’s still contested television station at the edge of District Two where the Gaddafi loyalists would be trapped in a diminishing pocket. “We know some of the call signs of those inside,” Swehli explained, as men around him fired mortars into the areas still under Gaddafi control. We know that call sign ‘1’ refers to Mo’atissim Gaddafi and that ‘3’ refers to Mansour Dhao, who is commanding the defences. We have an inkling too about someone known as ‘2’, who we have not heard from for a while and who has either escaped or been killed.” That person, he believed, was Abdullah Senussi, Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence chief.
“There is someone important in there, too,” Swelhi said, almost as an afterthought. “We have heard several times about something called ‘the asset’ which has been moved around the city.” Precisely who and what “the asset” was now is clear, even if most government fighters in and around the city could not believe it at the time. They were convinced that Libya’s former leader was in all likelihood hiding in the Sahara desert. But the asset was Gaddafi himself, who would die in the city, humiliated and bloody, begging his captors not to shoot him. There are other clips that complete much of the story: Gaddafi slumped on a pickup truck, face smeared with blood, apparently unconscious; Gaddafi shirtless and bloody on the ground surrounded by a mob; Gaddafi dead in the back of an ambulance. What is not there is the moment of his death – and how it happened – amid claims that he was killed by fighters with a shot to the head or stomach. By Friday, the day after he died, the body of the former dictator once so feared by his Libyan opponents was facing a final indignity – being stored on the floor of a room-sized freezer in Misrata usually used by restaurants and shops to keep perishable goods.
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