Qaddafi, Son and Former Defense Aide Buried in Secret Place

MISURATA, Libya - After four days of public viewing of the slowly decomposing corpses of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, one of his sons and his former defense minister in a Misurata meat locker, the military council in this city said on Tuesday that the three were buried in a predawn funeral at a secret location

Ibrahim Beitalmal, a senior official on the council, said 18 relatives of Colonel Qaddafi, his son Muatassim, and the defense minister, Abu Bakr Younes, were permitted to attend the funeral, including a nephew of Colonel Qaddafi, Mahmoud Hamid. Cellphone photos of the ceremony showed three bodies shortly before the burial, wrapped in white shrouds, in coffins of thin wood.

Mr. Beitalmal declined to specify where they had been interred or how the location would be kept secret.

Officials of the Transitional National Council, the interim government, had said they would not disclose the location of the grave, fearing that it would be desecrated or become a shrine for supporters of Colonel Qaddafi, who was killed last Thursday. The three men were among those seized by Misurata-based fighters in Surt, the colonel's home town on the Mediterranean coast, where he had fled for refuge after the rebellion that toppled him in August.

All three men apparently died in captivity, under circumstances that have not been clarified - particularly in the case of Colonel Qaddafi, seen alive after capture in cellphone videos posted on the Internet and then dead, apparently from a bullet wound to the head, in later photographs.

Responding to international pressure, the interim government has said it would investigate his death, since the killing of captives is considered a war crime. But there is virtually no appetite in Libya for prosecuting the killer or killers of Colonel Qaddafi, whose death ended a brutal dictatorship and signified the end of the most violent uprising so far in the Arab Spring political upheavals.

This port city harbored a virulent hostility for Colonel Qaddafi because of his military's vicious assaults here during the seven-month rebellion that ultimately overthrew him. The Misurata brigade of fighters who brought Colonel Qaddafi and the other two men back here allowed the corpses to putrefy on bloody mattresses in a meat locker that became a makeshift morgue and public viewing area. Hundreds of Libyans filed past the corpses for a look over four days, until officials ended the spectacle late Monday because the bodies were decomposing so badly.

In Tripoli on Tuesday, Col. Ahmed Bani, a spokesman for the Transitional National Council's military wing, dismissed reports by Human Rights Watch and others of a massacre in Surt possibly committed by anti-Qaddafi forces, saying those who were killed "were resisting our troops. They were killed during fighting." Colonel Bani, speaking at a news conference, said "Our fighters were just doing their duty."

A visit to Surt on Monday showed clear signs of a mass killing outside the Mahari Hotel, where volunteers were collecting dozens of bodies, apparently of people executed days earlier. The hotel had been used by anti-Qaddafi fighters during their assault on Surt.

Colonel Bani also brushed away a question about mistreatment of Qaddafi loyalists, saying "Our Islamic values insist that we give the right treatment to prisoners."

Colonel Bani confirmed that government members were present at the early-morning burial of Colonel Qaddafi, but refused to elaborate, saying that Libyan tradition forbade giving "precise details about who was present."

Echoing suggestions made Monday by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, chairman of the Transitional National Council, that Colonel Qaddafi had not been killed by the fighters who captured him - graphic videos of his death strongly suggest otherwise - the military spokesman hinted that other forces might have been responsible.

"We will look into the reasons for the killing of Qaddafi, and into who had an interest in seeing him killed," Colonel Bani said.

The Transitional National Council had previously said Colonel Qaddafi was killed by a bullet wound to the head in a gunfight between his captors and loyalists in Surt, without specifying who may have fired the fatal shot.

On Tuesday, a Misurata-based fighter who was among those who had recorded footage of Colonel Qaddafi's capture on a cellphone camera offered another inconclusive narrative of how he may have died. The fighter, Ayman Almani, 24, said he saw another fighter shoot the colonel moments after he had been hauled from a Surt storm drain where he had been hiding.

Mr. Almani would not identify the shooter and did not have the actual shooting image captured on his cellphone video clip, which he has not uploaded to the Internet and has refused to sell to news media organizations.

But the clip, which he allowed a reporter for The New York Times to view, shows fighters slapping and shoving Colonel Qaddafi for about three minutes while he was seated on a vehicle hood, followed by the sound of gunfire, where no images of Colonel Qaddafi are seen, followed by Colonel Qaddafi lying on the ground, seemingly unconscious, shirt pulled up, with an apparent bullet wound in his abdomen.

Asked why he would not identify the shooter, Mr. Almani said: "I do not want to be remembered as the one who sold him out."

source: Newyork Times