Tarhouna/Benghazi/London: Last Friday, more than three days after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi's Bab Al Aziziya compound, the soldiers of the Khamis Brigade in southern Tripoli were told to stand by for an important visitor.
Soon afterwards, dressed in a green civilian shirt and trousers, Gaddafi drove through the gate in the back seat of a black Hyundai saloon. The car, virtually indistinguishable from the taxis in the city, passed unnoticed only yards from the centre of the fighting in the southern outskirts of the Libyan capital.
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Extraordinary new details of the Gaddafi clan's last meeting after the fall of Tripoli — and the ousted dictator's plans to flee — are considered to be the last confirmed sighting of the former Libyan strongman.
Details also emerged on Tuesday night of how Gaddafi's wife Safiya, his daughter Aisha and sons Hannibal and Mohammad eluded the revolutionaries to flee across the country in a convoy of armoured limousines before taking refuge in Algeria.
Humanitarian
Such was the chaotic nature of their flight that, at one point, they blundered across the wrong border — entering into Tunisia before reaching Algeria thanks only to the intervention of local tribesmen.
Arriving in Tunisia, which has had its own revolution, could have resulted in their arrest rather than sanctuary. Algeria insisted the convoy had been given refuge on ‘humanitarian' grounds but the decision sparked a diplomatic rift with the revolutionaries' interim administration in Libya.
On Tuesday it also emerged Aisha Gaddafi gave birth to a girl only hours after being given refuge. Their flight came as revolutionaries hailed the death of Gaddafi's youngest son, Khamis, the commander of one of the most feared military units, in fighting to the south of the capital.
Only hours before Khamis was at a final meeting with his father and heavily pregnant sister at the Salah Al Deen military barracks in the southern suburbs of Tripoli. Abdul Salam Taher Ali, a soldier who was present, said: "We were trying to hold the southern suburbs when we were suddenly told to retreat to barracks for a new mission. We saw Khamis, Gaddafi's son, dressed in green military fatigues. Then Gaddafi himself arrived in an ordinary civilian car.
"At the same time, Aisha drove in separately in a white Hyundai saloon. They were both in civilian clothes and were accompanied by two bodyguards." Ali, who is being held by revolutionaries, then described how Gaddafi and his son, but not Aisha, huddled for a family talk lasting 10 to 15 minutes.
"I could not hear what they were saying," he said. "But their body language looked worried." After, Gaddafi and Aisha changed cars, getting into two Toyota Land Cruisers, and headed to the south in a 25-car convoy, he said. "As they got in, I heard one of the drivers say that they would be going toward the city of Sabha," he said. Sabha in the middle of the Sahara desert has long been mooted as the dictator's final redoubt.
Outside the compound, television camera crews noted a sudden blast of gunfire aimed at the encircling revolutionaries at 1.30pm. What appeared to be a last act of defiance from the loyalists camped inside, now appears to have been covering fire for Gaddafi's retreat from Tripoli.
Khamis then gathered the 90 or so soldiers, including Ali, around him for what was to prove his final journey. "He looked a little bit nervous," said Ali.
Khamis drove in an armoured Land Cruiser which now stands burned and wrecked outside the town of Tarhouna, about 128 kilometres south-east of Tripoli, where it was ambushed by fighters before it reached Bani Walid.
The revolutionaries took photographs and DNA samples from the bodies before burying them, he said. Where Gaddafi himself went after leaving his son remains unclear. But with exits from the city to the south blocked by rebel forces, the convoy is thought to have taken a loop east and then south towards Bani Walid.
