For Abouhriba, the state of the country's economy -- wracked by inflation and conflict -- is more stark evidence that life was better under Gaddafi. He said Bani Walid's attachment to the former leader stretches to his son Seif al-Islam, whose face appears on posters on the walls of town. Daily newsletter Receive essential international news every morning. Take international news everywhere with you! Download the France 24 app. The content you requested does not exist or is not available anymore.
ON TV. On social media. Unable to buy spare parts, the story went, Libyan Arab Airlines could not fly its planes safely. The dead were victims of what Gaddafi liked to represent to visitors as Western terrorism. The official explanation varied.
Eventually the regime jailed the pilot of a Libyan Air Force MiG and his instructor, claiming they had collided with the plane. The instructor, Majid Tayari, agreed to meet us in a Tripoli hotel. There was no collision, he insisted. He saw part of the tail of the hurtling towards him. Something hit the MiG from underneath, then fire broke out.
Both pilots ejected. According to him the had been hit first. Pieces of fuselage rained down at very high speed and punctured the skin of the MiG. Libyan Arab Airlines' air safety manager in , Mahmud Tekalli, also disputes that a mid-air collision was the cause.
He believes flight was deliberately destroyed. We went to the crash site and then negotiated our way past the militia guarding Tripoli airport. Off the road we found the wreckage of Flight in eerily good condition, protected by the desert climate, ready to lay bare its secrets to crash investigators.
Mr Aujali was not the only insider we met on our travels. On a private island in the Pacific Ocean, we talked to Lutz Kayser, a German rocket designer who worked for Gaddafi in the s. Mr Kayser says: "He was a very nice, modest person and I had the impression he was hiding his weakness behind a facade.
Mr Kayser's wife, Susanne, says Gaddafi was "charming and could charm the birds out of the trees" but she said he later became disillusioned when he failed to set up a "utopia" in Libya. In Havana we interviewed Frank Terpil, an American fugitive from justice who ran a "Murder Incorporated" operation for Gaddafi in the s, killing Libyan dissidents abroad.
Mr Terpil said: "Gaddafi thought that anybody who was a dissident was going to be eliminated. But as the weeks of the siege of Sirte went on, it became clear this was not true. A day later Dhao was interviewed by a television crew. The rebels were surrounding the whole area, so we had heavy clashes with them and tried to escape towards Jarif and break out of the siege.
After that the rebels surrounded us outside the area and prevented us from reaching the road to Jarif. They launched heavy raids on us which led to the destruction of the cars and the death of many individuals who were with us. I do not know what happened in the final moments, because I was unconscious after I was hit on my back.
Some things do not ring true. According to Dhao, Gaddafi was moving from place to place and apartment to apartment until last week, but given the state of the siege of Sirte at that stage it seems unlikely that he could have entered the city from outside.
The net was closing around the last loyalists who were squeezed into a pocket, surrounded on all sides, that was becoming ever smaller by the day. Dhao made no mention either of the attack on the Gaddafi convoy by a US Predator drone and a French Rafale jet as it tried to break out of Sirte, attempting to drive three kilometres through hostile territory before it was scattered and brought to a halt by rebel fighters.
It is possible that Dhao did not know that the first missiles to hit the Gaddafi convoy as it tried to flee came from the air. What is clear is that at around 8am on Thursday, as National Transitional Council fighters launched a final assault to capture the last remaining buildings in Sirte, in an area about metres square, the pro-Gaddafi forces had also readied a large convoy to break out.
These armed vehicles were leaving Sirte at high speed and were attempting to force their way around the outskirts of the city. The vehicles were carrying a substantial amount of weapons and ammunition, posing a significant threat to the local civilian population. The convoy was engaged by a Nato aircraft to reduce the threat.
It was that air attack — which destroyed around a dozen cars — that dispersed the convoy into several groups, the largest numbering about As NTC fighters descended on the fleeing groups of cars, some individuals jumped from their vehicles to escape on foot, among them Gaddafi and a group of guards.
Finding a trail of blood, NTC fighters followed it to a sandy culvert with two storm drains. In one of these Gaddafi was hiding. Accounts here differ. According to some fighters quoted after the event, he begged his captors not to shoot.
What is certain from several of the clips of video footage — most telling that shot by Ali Algadi — is that Gaddafi was dazed but still alive, although possibly already fatally wounded. The question is what happens between this and later images of a lifeless Gaddafi lying on the ground having his shirt stripped off and propped in the back of a pickup truck and the next sequence which shows him dead.
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