Rebel chief ‘tried to save Gaddafi’

Last night he insisted: “I tried to save his life but I couldn’t.”

The commander said it was impossible to tell who had fired the bullet that killed the fugitive tyrant.

“I didn’t see who killed, which weapon killed Gaddafi,” he said, adding that some of his fighters had wanted to shoot Gaddafi, but that he had tried to keep him alive.

After Gaddafi collapsed, al-Oweib said he drove him to a field hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Other reports have claimed “over-enthusiastic” fighters took matters into their own hands when they came face to face with the man they despised.

Gaddafi was making a final stand in his home town alongside his sons Saif al-Islam and Mo’tassim.

The latter was killed but whereabouts of Saif al-Islam, heir apparent to the regime, remained unclear last night, with National Transitional Council officials suggesting he had escaped Sirte after the attack on the convoy his father was travelling in.

Yesterday Libyan forces guarding the corpse of Gaddafi allowed members of the public to view the deposed dictator’s body, which had been covered up with a blanket to hide wounds inflicted by a baying mob.

Hundreds of people, including children, filed into a cold storage room to see Gaddafi’s decomposing body lying on a mattress on the floor, with guards handing out green surgical masks because of the stench of rotting flesh.

Men, women and children filed in to have their picture taken with the body.

The site’s guards had even organised separate visiting hours for families and single men. “We want to see the dog,” some chanted.

It was the second day the Libyan public had been allowed to see for themselves what had become of the man who ruled their country for 42 years.

While the minutes leading up to Gaddafi’s dramatic death were captured in grainy mobile phone footage seen around the world, it has not provided a definitive answer as to how he died or who killed him.

The body of Mo’tassim, had been moved from another location so that it lay next to his dead father.

The circumstances leading to the death of Mo’tassim – his father’s national security adviser – are also unclear, but wounds to his jaw and neck had been stitched up yesterday.

Later yesterday, the body of a third man, Abu Bakr Younus Jabr, head of Gaddafi’s armed forces, was brought into the cold storage room and placed between the former leader and his son.