Tripoli: Abdul Mojan's moment of realisation came when the people he thought were the good guys threw him into the boot of their car, slammed it shut and drove off with him a prisoner inside. When they finally stopped and hauled him out, he asked: "What are you doing? I'm a revolutionary just like you. I've never supported Gaddafi."

But the former rebels did not care. They had taken a liking to the new office block in western Tripoli that Mojan managed and they wanted the keys and ownership documents. "We have sacrificed for this revolution and you haven't, and now we will take what we want," he was told by a cocky 18 year-old. "You can have the building back when the revolution is over."

Many of Tripoli's residents have had a similar moment of grim awakening in recent weeks. Their liberators, still swaggering around the city in Che Guevara-style berets and armed to the teeth, have not gone back to their home towns as they promised. Nor have they handed in the guns.

More alarming than the looting have been the armed clashes between militias. There have been three big fights in the capital alone in the past week; shoot-outs at a hospital, Martyr's Square, and the military airport, which have left several dead.

Then there are the detentions. With the fighting over, the revolutionaries have kept busy rounding up hundreds of suspected Gaddafi supporters in a wide-scale witch-hunt. One man, a supporter of the revolution who was full of hope a month ago, described how his brother-in-law, Omar, had been grabbed by gunmen from Misurata. They were acting for a wealthy businessman from the city, with whom Omar had a dispute several years ago.

"Can you believe this? We have hundreds of little Gaddafis now."

Libya's problems would not look so dangerous if there was a proper government in place to deal with them. Instead, more than two months since Gaddafi was driven from his capital, there is still a power vacuum.

People in Tripoli try to laugh about the mountain men — they are particularly amused that they took jet-skis and fast boats back to their homes deep in the desert. But there is also a fear that now the gunmen have a taste for power, and nobody to stop them, the post-Gaddafi future may be much more difficult than Libyans had hoped.

— The Telegraph Group Limited,London 2011