Sirte Live Blog

Volunteers are still finding dozens of bodies in Muammar Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte.

Twenty-six unmarked makeshift graves covered by breeze-blocks were discovered at a water treatment plant in Number Two district where pro-Gaddafi fighters put up a final stand after several weeks of heavy bombardment.

According to Ibrahim Suleiman, one of the volunteers collecting bodies in Sirte over the past week, they were of pro-Gaddafi fighters hastily buried by comrades as NTC forces closed in on the city. 

In the centre, bodies of civilians were reportedly found under the rubble of a several-storey building flattened in a NATO air strike. [AFP]

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New Al Jazeera video on Sirte and how it's residents feel they are paying the price of the revolution.

 

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has condemned on Wednesday "a serious massacre" after finding 53 decomposing bodies, apparently of Gaddafi loyalists, some of whom it said may have been executed by revolutionary forces.

The New York based rights organisation saw the bodies on the lawn of the abandoned Mahari Hotel in Sirte on Sunday, and some had their hands bound.

About 20 Sirte residents were putting the bodies in body bags and preparing them for burial when HRW arrived at the hotel, the organisation said in a written statement.

The residents told HRW they had discovered the bodies on October 21, after the fighting in Sirte had stopped and they returned to their neighbourhood.

Sudan gave weapons, ammunition and other assistance to the former Libyan rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, a response to the slain leader's support for Sudan's own insurgencies, President Omar al-Bashir said on Wednesday. 

Sudan, which shares a border with Libya, has accused Gaddafi of supporting rebellions in its western Darfur region and in South Sudan, which declared independence in July. 

"You all know the role Libya played in destabilising Sudan and Sudan's security," Bashir told an audience in the eastern city of Kassala.

"Your support, whether it was humanitarian support, or weapons or ammunition, reached Libyan revolutionaries in Misrata, in the Western Mountains, in Benghazi, in Kufra," Bashir said. 

"The forces that entered Tripoli, part of their armament and their capabilities is 100 percent Sudanese." He did not give details about what weapons were provided or how many. 

Gaddafi's fugitive son Saif al-Islam and former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi are proposing to hand themselves into the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a senior Libyan military official with the National Transitional Council said on Wednesday. 

"They are proposing a way to hand themselves over to The Hague," Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters from Libya. 

Saif al-Islam is wanted by the war crimes court, as was his late father. There is also a warrant out for Senussi. 

Saif al-Islam has been on the run since Libyan forces overran his father's home town of Sirte at the weekend. He is thought to be somewhere near Libya's southern border with Niger. 

Mlegta said his information came from intelligence sources who told him that Saif al-Islam and Senussi were trying to broker a deal to surrender to the court through a neighbouring country, which he did not name. \

-Reuters 

The bodies of 267 people, many of them believed to have been summarily executed, have been found in Sirte, the hometown of slain Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, a Red Cross source told the online Libyan newspaper Qurynaew on Wednesday. 

Officials from the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, now in Sirte, had documented the bodies before they were buried in mass graves, the source told the Libyan paper. 

Al Jazeera's correspondent on the ground was told by an NTC official that Muammar Gaddafi, his son Motassim, and an aide were buried at dawn at a secret location in the desert.

Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, the commander of NATO operations, says that NATO "had no idea that Gaddafi was on board" the convoy that was hit by airstrikes as it fled Sirte.

"We saw a convoy and we had no idea that Gaddafi was on board. In fact, I was surprised that Gadhafi was in the Sirte area," the Canadian military officer said on Monday during a video conference from his headquarters in Naples, Italy.

He said that NATO air surveillance had detected 175 vehicles assembling in Sirte on Thursday morning, and that the alliance believed that they would be used to allow Gaddafi loyalists to flee the city as it fell to NTC forces.

"The vehicles started to make their way out, and one of the outcomes of this was the concern [that forces] from Sirte would join with the remnants of forces from Bani Walid and move into another desert area," Bouchard said.

"We went on from there to first of all attempt up to break up the convoy, to break it into manageable chunks and to slow it down (and) that's what we did.''

"We brought to bear our weapons systems on the convoy twice, and we achieved the aim of stopping the convoy," Bouchard said, adding that the presence of rockets and machine guns in some vehicles made them a legitimate target.

A report released by Human Rights Watch has found the bodies of 53 people, apparent Gaddafi supporters, which seem to have been executed at a hotel in Sirte last week.

The hotel is in an area of the city that was under the control of anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata before the killings took place, the report stated.

HRW has called on Libya's National Transitional Council to conduct an immediate and transparent investigation into the apparent mass execution an to bring those responsible to justice.

For more details on the report, check here.

This series of screegrabs from mobile phone video, provided by the AFP news agency, appears to show Gaddafi son Mutassim after his capture and before his death in Sirte on Thursday. Until now, the only images available of Mutassim showed his lifeless body, bearing a circular wound in his neck. In these images, his shirt appears to be covered in blood coming from a similar area.

The images raise the question of how Mutassim, like his father, died after being captured alive.

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