‘I am a fighter... I will die a martyr at the end’

LIBYAN leader Muammar Gaddafi vowed to fight on to his “last drop of blood” and roared at his supporters to take to the streets against protesters demanding his ouster, shouting and pounding his fist in a furious speech yesterday after two nights of a bloody crackdown in the capital trying to crush the uprising that has fragmented his regime.

It was the second time Gaddafi has appeared during the week of upheaval across his country. He spoke on state TV from behind a podium in the entrance of his bombed-out Tripoli residence hit by US air strikes in the 1980s and left unrepaired as a monument of defiance.

At times the camera panned back to show a towering monument of a gold-coloured fist crushing an American fighter jet, outside the building. But at the same time, the view gave a surreal image of the Libyan leader, shouting and waving his arms wildly all alone in a broken-down lobby with no audience, surrounded by broken tiles dangling from the ceiling, shattered concrete pillars and bare plumbing pipes.