Even before it has been conclusively established how Muammar Gaddafi died, a debate has begun about the implications of him having been killed by his captors. A bullet wound to his left temple seems to be widely regarded as conclusive evidence that he was swiftly and illegally executed.

There is however a more obvious explanation for what most likely turned out to be the fatal bullet wound: he shot himself.

The Guardian reports:

Among ordinary Libyans, there were few regrets about the bloody and preemptive manner of Gaddafi’s demise. Most worshippers at Friday prayers in the capital’s Martyrs Square said they were pleased Gaddafi had been killed. But one young woman said: “Some people do care about the rule of law and don’t think it’s right that he should have been assassinated.”

The NTC faces questions from international rights organisations. On Thursday, Jibril claimed that Gaddafi had been killed from a bullet to the head received in crossfire between rebel fighters and his supporters. He was dragged alive on to a truck, but died “when the car was moving”, Jibril said, citing forensic reports.

Gruesome mobile phone footage obtained by the Global Post undermines this account. It records the minutes after Gaddafi’s capture, when his convoy came under Nato and rebel attack. He is dragged out of a tunnel where he had been hiding. Blood is already pouring out of a wound on the left side of his head.

Gaddafi had already declared that he would die in Libya. As he lay in a drain and could hear approaching soldiers he knew the chase was over. At that point, was he simply going to wait to discover his own fate or determine it himself?

What he and most people probably wouldn’t know is that a bullet through the cerebral cortex is not necessarily going to result in instant death since this is not the part of the brain that controls the body’s vital functions.

In the minutes after Gaddafi’s capture, it’s certainly possible that he was shot, but there are two reasons to doubt this is what happened. In such a tight throng, anyone firing such a shot risked shooting someone else, and even though there is now a considerable amount of cell-phone footage showing the way he was man-handled there is, as far as I’m aware, none that actually shows him being shot.

Perhaps there was a momentary lull in all that chaos, everyone put their cell phones in their pockets and then he was shot. Maybe — but I doubt it. Indeed, in this age where there is a universal hunger to capture every historic moment on a cell phone, this seems like one moment that someone — had they the opportunity — was bound to record.

Juan Cole writes: The final weeks of Muammar Qaddafi’s violent and coercive life reminded me vividly of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple Cult. It was obvious from late last August that Qaddafi had lost. The people in his own capital of Tripoli rose up against him in all but a few small neighborhoods, courageously defying his murderous elite forces.

Qaddafi had on more than one been occasion offered exile abroad, but sneaked off to his home town of Sirte to make a suicidal last stand. His glassy-eyed minions determinedly fired every last tank and artillery shell they had stockpiled right into the city that sheltered them in order to stall the advancing government troops. This monumentally stupid last stand turned Sirte into Beirut circa the 1980s, as gleaming edifices deteriorated into Swiss cheese and then ultimately blackened rubble. Qaddafi had favored Sirte with magnificent conference centers and wood-paneled conference rooms even as he starved some Eastern cities of funds, and in his death throes he took all his gifts back away from the city of his birth, making it drink the tainted Kool-Aid of his maniacal defiance of reality.
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The last stand at Sirte was very like Jim Jones’s last stand in the jungles of Guyana. Jones was an American religious leader who gradually went mad, demanding more and more sacrifice and obedience from the members of his People’s Temple congregation, which then gradually became a cult. I define a cult as a group wherein the leader makes very high demands for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the values of which diverge from those of mainstream society. When the outside world seemed clearly to be pursuing the People’s Temple into Guyana, with a Congressmen showing up in Jonestown to rescue a handful of adherents who wanted to go home, Jones reacted with fury, first sending a militia to kill the congressman and the defectors, and then instructing his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Many were injected with cyanide laced with liquids or shot. Those who would not agree voluntarily to be “translated” to the next world together with their messianic leader would be subjected to the ultimate coercion.

Qaddafi’s stand at Sirte underlined the cultish character of his politics, with the Revolutionary Committees and Khamis Brigades resembling the enforcers in Jim Jones’s encampment. The tragic episode highlights the irrationality, fanaticism, violence and tyranny of his acolytes.

It would have been better had Qaddafi been left alive to stand trial. The exact circumstances of his death are murky, but it appears that some of his loyalists may have attempted to rescue him from government troops and he died in the firefight or was dispatched lest he be sprung from captivity and serve as a rallying point for the remaining handful of cultists.

Those who expect Libya now to fragment, or to turn into a North African Baghdad, are likely to be disappointed. It is improbable that Qaddafi’s cult will long survive him, at least on any significant scale. Libya has no sectarian divides of the Sunni-Shiite sort. Almost everyone is a Sunni Muslim. It does have an ethnic divide, as between Arabs and Berbers. But the Berbers are bilingual in Arabic, and are in no doubt as to their Libyan identity. The Berbers vigorously joined in the revolution and more or less saved it, and are very likely to be richly rewarded by the new state.

The east-west divide only became dire because Qaddafi increasingly showed favoritism toward the west. A more or less democratic government that spreads around the oil largesse more equitably could easily overcome this divide, which is contingent and not structural.

Libyan identity is not in doubt, and most Libyans are literate and have been through state schools. Most Libyans live in cities where tribal loyalties have attenuated.

There will be conflicts, and factionalism is a given. The government is a mess, with only a small bureaucracy and limited pools of persons with management skills. But oil states in the Gulf facing similar problems back in the 1960s and 1970s just imported Egyptian bureaucrats and managers, and Egypt and Tunisia have a surplus of educated potential managers who face under-employment of their skills at home. Oil states most often generate enough employment not only for their own populations but for a large expatriate work force as well. Just as the pessimists were surprised to find that post-Qaddafi Tripoli was relatively calm and quickly overcame initial problems of food, water and services, so they are likely to discover that the country as a whole muddles through.

One of the most perverse features of a strand of “progressive” attitudes towards the war in Libya (evident among quite a few commenters on this site) is that if post-Gaddafi Libya turns out not to fall apart, this will be a cause of secret disappointment to those who invested so deeply in their own apocalyptic predictions. As I’ve said from the outset, this isn’t an argument worth expending much energy in, proving one side is right and the other wrong, since it’s an argument that doesn’t need to be won — events themselves will be the proof.

Having said that, I want to say more about the issue of cultism, because like Juan Cole, many other observers have noted the cultish features of Gaddafi’s rule.

Cults tend to be associated with religious belief rather than political rule and for that reason what could be seen around Gaddafi is more often described as cult-like rather than as being unambiguously a cult.

Cole provides a reasonable working definition of a cult: “I define a cult as a group wherein the leader makes very high demands for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the values of which diverge from those of mainstream society, and the values of which diverge from those of mainstream society.”

But what needs to be underlined is that cults are not defined by exotic belief systems.

The stereotypical image of a cult would be a group like Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate whose members committed suicide in 1997 with the expectation that they would thereby board a spacecraft and escape from Earth.

The problem with associating cults with such belief systems is that the weirdness of these beliefs are really a distraction from the underlying social psychology that binds the cult together.

Cults have two core attributes:

1. Cult members surrender their own autonomy by submitting themselves to the rule of a charismatic individual who has some kind of messiah complex. This is different from obedience to rule by say a monarch, because whereas there is a sharp divide between the king/queen and his/her subjects, cult members and cult leaders are bonded in the experience of merging in a supra-personal identity. Gaddafi didn’t simply rule Libya — he became Libya and his closest devotees could no longer differentiate between their love for him and their love for their country.

2. As a social entity, a cult depends on a rigid boundary between the inside and the outside. From the inside, outsiders are viewed as being so other and so lost that the outsiders’ word and the world they inhabit become worthless in the eyes of the cult. Communication only flows inside a closed and self-reinforcing system and as this closed society evolves, the contagion of unchallenged delusion infects the cult leader as much if not more than the cult followers. As rational as it might have been for Gaddafi to surrender or engineer a safe exit, he couldn’t do so without losing his identity — an edifice of such giant proportions that it became impossible to deconstruct.

The inherent structural weakness of every cult offers a lesson to society at large: a healthy society does not merely tolerate dissent; it recognizes dissent as an essential attribute of social vitality.

Dissent is the king’s fool. Without dissent there is no engine of adaptation.

The New York Times reports: The head of the Libyan military council said that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed Thursday as fighters battling the vestiges of his fallen regime wrested control of his hometown of Surt after a prolonged struggle. Al-Jazeera television showed what it said was Colonel Qaddafi’s corpse as Libyans rejoiced.

Abdul Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the Tripoli military council, said on Al Jazeera that the former leader had been killed and that anti-Qaddafi forces had his body.

The report of Colonel Qaddafi’s death by the highest ranking military officer in Libya’s interim government appeared to put an end to the fierce manhunt for the former leader who remained on the lam in Libya for weeks after the fall of his government.

Libya’s interim leaders had said they believed that some Qaddafi family members — possibly including Colonel Qaddafi and several of his sons — were hiding in the coastal town of Surt or in Bani Walid, another loyalist bastion that the anti-Qaddafi forces captured several days ago.

There were multiple reports on Thursday that Colonel Qaddafi had been either captured or killed in the fighting. Previous such reports regarding high-level Qaddafi officials have proven false.

As rumor of his death spread in the capital, Tripoli, car horns blared as many celebrated in the streets.

Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, traveling with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Afghanistan, said the department was aware of the reports “on the capture or killing of Muammar Qaddafi” but could not confirm them “at this time.”

There was no immediate comment from Mr. Jalil, the interim government’s top official. If confirmed, the capture or killing of Colonel Qaddafi — along with the fall of Surt — would allow Mr. Abdul Jalil to declare the country liberated and in control of its borders, and to start a process that would lead to a general election for a national council within eight months.

Libyan fighters said on Thursday that they had routed the last remaining forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi from the Surt, ending weeks of fierce fighting that had prevented Libya’s interim rulers from declaring the country liberated and starting the transition to an elected government.

A military spokesman for the interim government, Abdel Rahman Busin, said, “Surt is fully liberated.”

Peter Beaumont reports: The stories of some of those inside Ibn Sana hospital in Sirte do not add up. Hamad Ashrak Ali from Sudan is lying on a bed in the hospital’s basement. He shows us his wound before explaining the circumstances of it. He has been shot through the side. The bullet exited through one buttock – the wound is becoming septic.

He says he came from Abyei in his own country to Sirte to earn money: “I thought I could earn money here by loading trucks.”

He does not explain why he chose Gaddafi’s hometown in particular and claims at first to have been in the hospital with his wound for 50 days.

But his wound is relatively recent, the muscles still pronounced. He has not spent almost two months in a hospital bed.

“Kids were doing handbrake turns,” – doughnuts, he calls them. “Someone fired a gun and I was shot.” He is asked again how long he has been in hospital. He changes his story. “Since April,” he says.

A bearded fighter from the forces of the NTC suggests quietly that Hamad is lying. Other fighters say they have a list and know who are the mercenaries and pro-Gaddafi fighters in the hospital.

Not far away an emaciated man struggles up from his bed, stick thin.

Other patients in this dreadful place seem comatose, afflicted with wounds long gone rotten, people in desperate need of evacuation.

But for now there is nowhere for them to go.

Not even the Red Cross has been able to evacuate the bombed out hospital. The nearby field hospitals are full, as is the hospital in Misrata. So they are stuck in this shattered shell.

Outside on the street, a three-car convoy drives by towards the Ouagadougou conference centre.

Skinny men with dark-skinned, emaciated faces are packed into two cars, with more sitting slumped in open boots.

Recent deserters from the pro-Gaddafi forces, who have been fighting to defend this city for a fallen and defeated regime, they are guarded by NTC fighters in the final car.

As the new government force push forward from the east and west towards the sea, life in Gaddafi’s home town and in his second capital is revealed.

The pro-Gaddafi forces – for so long invisible in their positions, where they have poured down fire on the advancing fighters – have been revealed for what they are. Ordinary men, frightened, who now want only to survive by surrendering, hiding in the hospital or trying to escape with fleeing civilians.

Time reports: An official on Libya’s governing council said Monday that he believes Muammar Gaddafi is hiding in the southwestern desert near the borders with Niger and Algeria, but denied allegations that the Tuareg minority ethnic group is protecting the fugitive leader.

Moussa al-Kouni, who is a Tuareg representative on the revolution’s leadership body, claimed Gadhafi had sent his son Khamis to the area to set up a radio station and make preparations for a possible escape route two months before Tripoli fell to revolutionary forces in late August.

Al-Kouni provided no evidence, saying he based his assertion on the fact that the Gadhafi regime had used the area before because it has rough terrain and porous borders that would make detection difficult. He also pointed out that Gadhafi had cultivated close ties with the Niger government and could even be going back and forth across the border.

“As far as I am aware, Gadhafi is in that region … on the border with Niger,” he told reporters in Tripoli, adding that Gadhafi could get safe passage through Niger to Mali, where he allegedly has a house in Timbuktu. Niger has put Gadhafi’s son al-Saadi under house arrest.

Peter Beaumont reports from Sirte on the final push to end the war in Libya: On Thursday a pall of white smoke hung across this district as shells exploded every few minutes, and people in the hotel warned of a sniper firing from the minaret of a mosque 500 metres away from the hotel.

“We want to get this thing finished quickly,” said a young bearded fighter standing by the wrecked lifts. “We had a plan to try and open the road to the hospital to evacuate civilians, but there were too many snipers. Yesterday we tried many times to open the road.”

It is a reflection of the nature of Libya’s last battle. The new government has said it will announce full liberation when Sirte is taken, even though a second town – Bani Walid – has also yet to fall.

But it is on the fall of Sirte that all expectations have been pegged.

The battle is a ramshackle affair. On the west side of the city, where the katibas [rebels] from Misrata launch almost daily attempts to take the Gaddafi stronghold of the Ougadougou conference centre, the fighters gathered for an impromptu breakfast outside a little field hospital. On Thursday they had poured in behind three tanks only to be driven back by missiles.

On the east side of Sirte, reached via a dirt road that skirts the city, the forces appear more organised. In the morning, a group met at a roundabout on the outskirts of the city, close to where a tank was pounding the buildings below. A burst of bullets came across the roundabout, sending the men scuttling for cover.

“Yesterday the Gaddafi forces come up to the roundabout with an anti-aircraft gun and fired at us,” said Salam Farjani, 37, who came to Sirte from Bayda. There were no civilians around at this time; Farjani explained that they try to leave early in the morning and at dusk, when it is safer.

“The ones who are left are the ones who have no petrol for their cars,” he said. “And the Gaddafi fighters in the town are just fighting for their survival.”

Reuters reports:

Dressed in rags and holding a cellphone, Muammar Gaddafi sits in the shade of an oasis palm in the southern Libyan desert. He gazes wistfully at signs that say “Niger 450 km”, “Burkina Faso 2,700 km”, “Algiers, 650 km”.

The cartoon, displayed on an easel in the lobby of Tripoli’s Mahari hotel, raises a smile from patrons checking their AK-47 assault rifles and machine pistols in the wooden gun rack behind the security desk.

Just about no one knows where the former leader is hiding, six weeks after Libya’s revolution finally broke his hold on the capital in an operation coordinated with NATO and Arab powers.

His aides and some of his sons scattered to provincial strongholds, where at least two — Mutassem and Saif al-Islam — are now believed to be fighting for their survival, respectively in Gaddafi’s coastal home town of Sirte and the inland town of Bani Walid.

Of their father, there is little trace.

But by coincidence rather than design, the mocking portrait of Gaddafi in the Mahari, temporary home to senior revolutionary fighters, illustrates neatly the working assumptions that lie behind the manhunt.

Such clues as exist seem to point south, placing the 69-year-old close to the country’s southern borders with sub-Saharan Africa.

And, as the drawing suggests, those who are tracking him suspect he is seeking a refuge in a Sahelian or sub-Saharan country, the regions where the man who called himself Africa’s “King of Kings” cultivated allies for decades.

A move abroad would place him at risk of arrest by African countries which are signed up to The Hague war crimes court. Many suggest he could outfox his pursuers by hiding in plain sight in an urban setting in Libyan’s north — a tactic employed successfully for years by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden until his killing by U.S. forces in Pakistan in May.

But in many respects the Sahara makes sense.

It may look near-empty from the map, but the world’s biggest desert serves as a contraband superhighway, especially at night when fewer eyes — including satellites — are watching.

The 69-year-old may now calculate he can vanish among the smugglers, shepherds, bandits, illegal migrants and militants who roam this part of Africa without a trace.

From what could be Gaddafi’s last refuge, Reuters reports:

Many residents of Sirte, Muammar Gaddafi’s birth-place, blame Libya’s new rulers and their Western allies for the death and destruction unleashed on their city by weeks of fighting.

Most are reluctant to talk openly about their allegiances, for fear they will be branded as members of a pro-Gaddafi fifth column. Yet their anger and bitterness is clear.

“This country has been built around one man. If he is over, Libya will be over,” said a resident who gave his name as al-Fatouri, standing outside his home on the outskirts of Sirte.

“Gaddafi is like a picture frame. When part of the frame is hit, the whole picture will be destroyed, Libya will be destroyed,” he said.

Sirte is the sternest test yet of the ability of the interim government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), to win over Gaddafi’s tribe and prevent it from mounting an Iraq-style insurgency that would destabilise Libya and the region.

While most cities captured by NTC forces have rejoiced, or at least given that impression, Sirte is different because it is home to members of Gaddafi’s tribe who genuinely back him.

“Let them look for Muammar, but do not kill 50,000 people to change the regime,” said Fatouri. “It is not worth it that thousands die in Sirte for Muammar. This is what saddens us.”

Fatouri said he, like thousands of other people from this city on the Mediterranean coast, had fled his home days ago because of the fighting. He decided later to come back.

“We refuse to leave, we don’t want to suffer… We would rather die here than leave our houses and suffer,” he said.

As he spoke, the sound of shelling and heavy machine guns reverberated around him and a crowd of locals gathered.

“They (NTC forces) used to start their day with bombing us, and finish it with bombing us… The kids used to hear the shelling like music,” said another resident standing nearby.

Reuters reports:

In the walled old city of Tripoli, Libya’s independence flag pokes through crumbling buildings and a gang of children wielding toy pistols tear through dusty alleyways.

In these run-down streets stands the empty, faded peach-colored Dar Bishi synagogue.

The interior can only be seen by climbing up the rubble of a collapsed house and the ark, which would normally shelter the sacred Torah scroll, is instead stuffed with a mattress.

The Hebrew inscription above it “Hear, O Israel” is barely perceptible from wear, and empty paint cans are strewn across the floor. The site of the Mikve baths, used once for ritual cleansing, is now a trash dump where stray cats scour for food next to a discarded washing machine as veiled women look on.

Libyan Jewish exile David Gerbi said he has dreamed of restoring this synagogue for 10 years, when smoke from New York’s burning twin towers evoked one of the most powerful memories of his Libyan childhood.

The 12-year-old Gerbi and his family fled Tripoli in 1967 when an Arab-Israeli war stoked anger against the Jewish state and led to attacks on Jews in his neighborhood.

Gaddafi expelled the rest of Libya’s 38,000 Jews two years later and confiscated their assets. Most Tripoli synagogues have since been destroyed or converted to mosques. Jewish cemeteries have been razed to make way for office blocks on the coast.

Gerbi says he is the first Jew to return to Libya since the revolt that ousted Muammar Gaddafi in August.

He said he knows this because he negotiated the extraction of the last one — his aged, dying aunt who stayed behind to protect the family treasures — from a hospice in 2002.

Now that Gaddafi is gone, Gerbi wants to help interim Libyan leaders rebuild the lost Libya of his childhood and foster the type of religious tolerance between Jews and Muslims that exists in other parts of the Maghreb such as Morocco.

And he wants the Dar Bishi synagogue to be the symbol of reconciliation between Jewish and Muslim Libyans.