Gaddafi's Final Resting Place: 'Secret Desert Grave'
Now that basically everyone in Libya has seen the corpse former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in the mall freezer where he's been kept since his death last week, it's time to find a new spot to keep him. Like a "secret desert grave"!
The country's National Transitional Council has apparently been negotiating with Gaddafi's extended family in Sirte, and has come to a conclusion that will satisfy everyone:
"He will be buried tomorrow in a simple burial with sheikhs attending the burial. It will be an unknown location in the open desert," the official told Reuters by telephone [...] An NTC official had told Reuters several days ago that there would be only four witnesses to the burial, and all would swear on the Koran never to reveal the location.
Why the rush? For one thing, the body is getting fresh. Really fresh:
In Misrata, Libya's long-besieged third city, whose war leaders want a big role in the peace, fighters handing out surgical masks on Monday against the stench were still ushering hundreds of sightseers into the chill room where the bodies of Gaddafi, his son Mo'tassim and his former army chief lay on the floor, their flesh darkening and leaking fluids.
For all the wrangling over his body, the circumstances of Gaddafi's death are still unclear. The official claim is that Gaddafi died in a firefight after he'd been captured, but the videos emerging from the moment he was taken prisoner certainly don't show rebels as models of restraint and civility; today, Global Post posted a video that it claims shows the dictator being "sodomized [by] some kind of stick or knife."
Some NTC members are claiming that Gaddafi's own aides killed him in an effort to avoid an eventual trial; several bodies—including the UN and the Gaddafi family—have called for an investigation.
