Officials delay Gaddafi burial for investigation

The burial of Muammar Gaddafi has been delayed until his death can be examined by the International Criminal Court, Libyan officials said.

Mohamed Sayeh, a senior member of the governing National Transitional Council, says a “third party will come from outside of Libya to go through the paperwork”.

Mr Sayeh also said Gaddafi’s body is still in Misrata, where it was taken after his killing in Sirte. He said Gaddafi will be buried with respect according to Islam tradition and will not have a public funeral.

The delay comes as bloody images of the despot’s last moments have raised questions over how exactly he died after he was captured wounded.

The UN human rights office says there needs to be a probe into the circumstances of Gaddafi’s death.

A spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the shaky amateur videos showing a captured Gaddafi first alive, then dead, were “very disturbing”.

Rupert Colville told reporters in Geneva that an existing UN panel investigating human rights abuses in Libya was likely to examine the death. He said it might recommend a national or international probe.

Mr Colville said the victims of Gaddafi’s 42-year-rule deserve to see proper judicial procedures followed and perpetrators of abuses brought to trial.

Video on Arab television stations showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling the goateed, balding Gaddafi, with blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt.

Gaddafi struggled against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters pushed him on to the bonnet of a pick-up truck.

One fighter held him down, pressing on his thigh with a pair of shoes in a show of contempt.

Fighters propped him on the bonnet as they drove for several moments, apparently to parade him around in victory.

“We want him alive. We want him alive,” one man shouted before Gaddafi was dragged off the hood, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance.

Later footage showed fighters rolling Gaddafi’s lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head.

His body was then paraded on a car through Misrata, a nearby city that suffered a brutal siege by regime forces during the eight-month civil war that eventually ousted Gaddafi. Crowds in the streets cheered: “The blood of martyrs will not go in vain.”

The death of Gaddafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom.

It also thrusts Libya into a new age in which its transitional leaders must overcome deep divisions and rebuild nearly all its institutions from scratch to achieve dreams of democracy.

“We have been waiting for this historic moment for a long time. Muammar Gaddafi has been killed,” prime minister Mahmoud Jibril said in the capital of Tripoli.

“I would like to call on Libyans to put aside the grudges and only say one word, which is Libya, Libya, Libya.”