The lifeless figure lay naked but for tan-colored trousers, bloodied and beaten, with gouge marks across his chest and a bullet hole in one temple. This was the man who instilled terror into Libyans for nearly 42 years. Under a bare fluorescent light at the back of a food market, Muammar Gaddafi's body lay on a dusty, narrow foam mattress on Friday afternoon in a refrigerated room normally used for fruits and vegetables. The cocky ominipotence that strutted over Libya for two generations had become a pathetic, brutalized cadaver.
A small group of local residents filed in nervously. Blinking in the darkness before the light was switched on, they gasped as their eyes adjusted to Gaddafi's body, scarcely able to believe that they were peering into the dictator's dead face just inches away. It was, for them, concrete proof that their ruler was truly dust and to dust he was returning. An elderly man in a gray robe and white skullcap staggered out into the sun, lifted his arms to the sky and said, "Oh thank you God, thank you God." An 11-year-old boy waiting to enter, having been brought to the site by his father, sneered as he chewed a wad of gum, "I came because I want to see frizz head."(See pictures of the lengthy battle for Libya.)
One day after Gaddafi was finally cornered in a sewage ditch in his birthplace of Sirt, fighters in Misratah ? where Gaddafi's body was taken after his death ? said they had moved him from a private house to the cold-storage room sometime after midnight. By then, about 12 hours had passed since he was shot ? by accident, insist officials of the new Libyan government ? and they perhaps feared that his body would begin to decompose badly even as Libyan officials continued discussing where and how to bury him.
In an interview with TIME on Thursday evening, Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said that Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) had decided it was too "unwise" to move Gaddafi to Tripoli about 150 miles away, since it could ignite "anger and bitterness" in the capital, making his funeral and burial site uncontrollable. He said Gaddafi would instead be buried on Friday in Misratah, which is about a two-hour drive from where the Colonel was finally brought to ground. (See a brief history of Muammar Gaddafi's 40-year rule.)
But by sundown Friday, Gaddafi was still unburied. Jibril arrived mid-afternoon from Tripoli to see the body and told reporters that the autopsy of Gaddafi could take another day or so. On Thursday evening, Jibril told TIME that Gaddafi had been caught in the crossfire during a firefight between rebel fighters and a group of his loyalists after he was discovered hiding in a sewage ditch. Jibril claimed rebels had been trying to carry Gaddafi, who was already wounded by what is believed to have been a NATO air attack on his convoy, to a makeshift ambulance at the time.
Yet footage shot on rebels' cell phones showed a crowd manically hitting and kicking, and some accounts of Gaddafi's last moments reported that he pleaded with rebels not to shoot. Looking at Gaddafi's body up close ? a distance of a few inches ? there seem to be signs he received a beating. There are deep-red lines across the right of his chest, as though he was struck or scratched several times. When I returned to the cold-storage room after a few minutes outside, a man in a blue medical coat exited, saying he was a dentist and had been trying to compare Gaddafi's dental records with those of the body inside. On Thursday, the NTC's Finance and Oil Minister Ali Tarhouni told TIME that officials were determined to provide indisputable proof that Gaddafi was dead, including conducting DNA tests. (See photos of Muammar Gaddafi's final moments.)
It is deeply ironic that Misratah is the city where Gaddafi's corpse now lies ? hardly a resting place. Just a mile from the cold-storage room, Misratah's main artery, Tripoli Street, still displays the ravages of rocket and missile fire, evidence of the city's long siege by the dictator's troops. But Misratah endured and survived. And to the city's pride, Misratah's fighters then led the final assault on Sirt, including the capture and killing of Gaddafi.
Unlike those in the suspect capital, Misratah's feelings for Gaddafi are clear and uncontaminated. The celebrations of Gaddafi's death on Friday are infused here with intense bitterness. Before Friday prayers in the open area in the city center, now named Freedom Square, a cleric delivered a sermon vilifying Gaddafi and smirking at his death. "You said you were staying in Libya and that you'd hunt us out like rats," he bellowed through the microphone while about 500 men sat on the ground under a blistering sun. "Instead they trapped you like a rat. Where are you now, Gaddafi?" The crowd shouted back: "In hell! God is Great!" (See "Gaddafi's Final Run: The End of the Colonel's Long, Weird Ride.")
On Friday, many in Misratah said they would like to see Gaddafi buried elsewhere ? even though most seemed delighted for the chance to file past his corpse while it was still there. "We don't want him buried anywhere in Libya," said Farouk Ben Hamida, 36, who was a cafeteria supervisor at the local steel factory before he took up arms and joined the revolution in February. "They should bury him at sea, like Osama Bin Laden."
By sunset on Friday, Gaddafi's corpse had not moved. By then, word had filtered through Misratah that he was lying in the market's cold-storage room, and hundreds of men and boys lined up to witness it, as though they needed to make sure that Gaddafi would indeed never return. Hours before, the fighters who brought him down had attempted to keep the location of his body secret. But within hours, Gaddafi had become this town's biggest-ever attraction.
See photos of life in Libya before Gaddafi.
See the top 15 toppled dictators.
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