TRIPOLI, Libya — As his capital fell last week, Moammar Khadafy and his family evaporated. Even the adopted daughter he claimed was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 1986 — wrongly, it now seems — disappeared from the city of 2 million, leaving behind her empty office at a Tripoli hospital.
Since then, he has released a few brief audio messages, with vintage insults four decades in the making. In one, he called on countrymen to cleanse his capital of rats, traitors and infidels. “Forward! Forward! Forward!” he cried.
On Sunday, Khadafy’s loyalists offered to negotiate, a proposal that the transitional government spokesman called “a daydream.”
“We are going to arrest them very soon,” spokesman Mahmoud Shammam said, though that has become the refrain of bad predictions.
“We really don’t know where he is right now,” acknowledged one senior U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in Washington.
