GENEVA, (Reuters) – The United Nations human rights office called today for a full investigation into the death of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and voiced concerns that he may have been executed.
Separate cellphone images showed a wounded and bloodied Gaddafi first alive and then later dead amidst a jostling crowd of anti-Gaddafi fighters after his capture in his hometown of Sirte yesterday.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about what happened exactly. There seem to be four or five different versions of how he died,” U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville told Reuters Television in an interview.
“If you take these two videos together, they are rather disturbing because you see someone who has been captured alive and then you see the same person dead.
“We are not in a position to say what has happened at this point but we feel that it is very important that this is clarified, that there is some sort of serious investigation into what happened and what caused his death,” he said.
Asked whether the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay was concerned Gaddafi may have been executed while in captivity, Colville replied:
“It has to be one possibility when you look at these two videos. So that’s something that an investigation needs to look into,” he said.
It is a fundamental principle of international law that people accused of serious crimes should be tried if possible, he said.
