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SIRTE, Libya - Former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters battling to complete an eight-month-old uprising against his rule overran his hometown, Sirte, Libya's interim rulers said.
His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte, is the most dramatic single development in the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and threatened the grip on power of the leaders of Syria and Yemen.
"He (Gadhafi) was also hit in his head," National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters. "There was a lot of firing against his group and he died."
Mlegta had told Reuters earlier that Gaddafi, who was in his late 60s, was captured and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a convoy that NATO warplanes attacked. Mlegta said Gadhafi had been taken away by an ambulance.
There was no independent confirmation of his remarks.
An anti-Gadhafi fighter said the ex-dictator had been found hiding in a hole in the ground and had shouted "Don't shoot, don't shoot" to the men who grabbed him.
His capture occurred within minutes of the fall of Sirte, a development that extinguished the last significant resistance by forces loyal to the deposed leader.
The capture of Sirte and the death of Gadhafi would mean Libya's ruling NTC can begin the task of forging a new democratic system, which it had said it would get under way after the city, built as a showpiece for Gadhafi's rule, had fallen.
Gadhafi, wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of ordering the killing of civilians, was toppled by rebel forces on Aug. 23 after 42 years of one-man rule over the oil-producing North African state.
NTC fighters hoisted the red, black and green national flag above a large utilities building in the centre of a newly captured Sirte neighborhood Thursday, and celebratory gunfire broke out among their ecstatic and relieved comrades.
Hundreds of NTC troops had surrounded Sirte, a Mediterranean coastal town, for weeks in a chaotic struggle that killed and wounded scores of the besieging forces and an unknown number of defenders.
NTC fighters said there were a large number of corpses inside the last redoubts of the Gadhafi troops. It was not immediately possible to verify that information.
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