BENGHAZI, Libya, (Reuters) – A $1.3 million bounty and an amnesty awaits anyone who hands over Muammar Gaddafi, alive or dead, Libya’s rebel council said today.
Rebel fighters are hunting for the man who ran the oil-exporting North African country for 42 years after storming his Tripoli compound on Tuesday, but finding it mostly abandoned. Fighting persisted in parts of chaotic Tripoli on Wednesday.
“The National Transitional Council announces that any of his (Gaddafi’s) inner circle who kills Gaddafi or captures him, society will give amnesty or pardon for any crimes,” NTC head Mustafa Abdel Jalil said at a news conference.
He added that a businessman in Benghazi, the eastern cradle of the Libyan uprising, had also offered a reward of 2 million dinars ($1.3 million) for Gaddafi’s capture.
The NTC has said it would prefer to seize Gaddafi alive so that he could be put on trial. But Jalil said Gaddafi would not give up easily and could still unleash a “catastrophic event”.
“We know Gaddafi’s regime is not over yet. The end will only come when he’s captured dead or alive. Gaddafi’s forces and his accomplices will not stop resisting until Gaddafi is caught or killed.”
A rebel military spokesman, Ahmed Bani, said earlier that rebel forces had captured all of the capital Tripoli, although some pockets of resistance remained in the city of 2 million.
Rebel fighters ransacked Gaddafi’s sprawling Bab al-Aziziya compound in the capital on Tuesday in what was widely seen as the final blow to his decades in power.
NTC leaders are keen to move from Benghazi to Tripoli, a symbolically important relocation to the capital in a vast desert country long dogged by regional rivalries.
Jalil said some top NTC officials were near Tripoli waiting to enter as soon as possible and the relocation of the NTC would be completed “during the next week”.
