In this Saturday, June 12, 2010 file photo, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi talks during a ceremony to mark the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of the American military bases in the country, in Tripoli, Libya. The Associated Press is aware of reports that Moammar Gadhafi has been captured in Sirte. The chief spokesman for the revolutionary National Transitional Council Jalal el-Gallal and the council military spokesman Abdul-Rahman Busin told the AP that those reports are unconfirmed. (AP Photo/ Abdel Magid Al Fergany, File)
SIRTE, Libya – SIRTE, Libya (AP) – Moammar Gadhafi, who ruled Libya with a dictatorial grip for 42 years until he was ousted by his own people in an uprising that turned into a bloody civil war, was killed Thursday by revolutionary fighters overwhelming his hometown, Sirte, the last major bastion of resistance two months after his regime fell.
The 69-year-old Gadhafi is the first leader to be killed in the Arab Spring wave of popular uprisings that swept the Middle East, demanding the end of autocratic rulers and the establishment of greater democracy.
“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Moammar Gadhafi has been killed,” Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told a news conference in the capital Tripoli. Interim government officials said one of Gadhafi’s sons, Muatassim, was also killed in Sirte and that another, Seif al-Islam, was captured wounded with a gunshot to the leg.
Footage aired on Al-Jazeera television showed Gadhafi was captured wounded but alive in Sirte. The goateed, balding Gadhafi is seen in a bloodsoaked shirt, and his face is bloodied. Standing upright, he is shoved along by a crowd of fighters on a Sirte roadside, chanting “God is great.”
Gadhafi appears to struggle against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters push him onto the hood of a pickup truck. “We want him alive. We want him alive,” one man shouts before Gadhahi is dragged away, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance.