Libya's Leader Gadhafi Killed

Moammar Gadhafi, 69, who ruled Libya with an oppressive grip for 42 years until he was ousted by his own people in an uprising that turned into a bloody civil war, was killed Thursday. Revolutionary forces overran his hometown, Sirte, which was the last major area of resistance since his regime fell two months ago.

"We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Moammar Gadhafi has been killed," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told a news conference in the capital Tripoli.

There has been a wave of uprisings across the Middle East demanding autocratic rulers to step down, but the Gadhafi led regime may have been one of the most unpredictable and unpopular that was constantly a target of international condemnation and isolation.

President Obama said to the Libyan people, "The U.S. along with the international community is committed to the people.  You have won your revolution. Provide dignity, freedom, and opportunity." Obama said Gadhafi's death "marks the end of a long and painful chapter" for Libya.

Details of his death remain unverified, but rebel fighters have reported that Gadhafi was barricaded in with his heavily armed loyalists in the last few buildings they held in his Mediterranean coastal hometown of Sirte. Despite the fall of Tripoli on Aug. 21, Gadhafi loyalists remained resistant in several areas, including Sirte.

Al-Jazeera TV showed footage of a man resembling Gadhafi lying dead or severely wounded, bleeding from the head and stripped to the waist as fighters rolled him over on the pavement.

Al-Jazeera video of Gadhafi's last moments (Warning: GRAPHIC CONTENT)

The body was then taken to the nearby city of Misrata, one of the bloodiest fronts of the civil war.

The streets of Tripoli have been filled with celebratory gunfire and chants of "Allahu Akbar" or "God is Great." In Sirte, the ecstatic former rebels celebrated the city's fall after weeks of bloody siege by firing endless rounds into the sky, pumping their guns, knives and even a meat cleaver in the air and singing the national anthem.

Libya's new leaders had said they would declare the country's "liberation" after the fall of Sirte.

Information Minister Mahmoud Shammam said he was told that Gadhafi was dead from fighters who said they saw the body.

"Our people in Sirte saw the body," Shammam told The Associated Press. "Revolutionaries say Gadhafi was in a convoy and that they attacked the convoy."

By Tuesday, fighters said they had squeezed Gadhafi's forces in Sirte into a residential area of about 700 square yards but were still coming under heavy fire from surrounding buildings.

"Our forces control the last neighborhood in Sirte," Hassan Draoua, a member of Libya's interim National Transitional Council, told The Associated Press in Tripoli. "The city has been liberated."