Mohammed al-Babi holds a golden pistol he says belonged to Moammar Gadhafi in Sirte, Libya, yesterday. Gadhafi, Libya's dictator for 42 years until he was ousted in an uprising-turned-civil war, was killed yesterday as revolutionary fighters overwhelmed his hometown of Sirte and captured the last major bastion of resistance two months after his regime fell.

SIRTE, Libya (AP):

Dragged from hiding in a drainage pipe, a wounded Moammar Gadhafi raised his hands and begged revolutionary fighters: "Don't kill me, my sons."

Within an hour, he was dead, but not before jubilant Libyans had vented decades of hatred by pulling the eccentric dictator's hair and parading his bloodied body on the hood of a truck.

The death yesterday of Gadhafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom.

It also thrusts Libya into a new age in which its transitional leaders must overcome deep divisions and rebuild nearly all its institutions from scratch to achieve dreams of democracy.

"We have been waiting for this historic moment for a long time. Moammar Gadhafi has been killed," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in the capital of Tripoli. "I would like to call on Libyans to put aside the grudges and only say one word, which is Libya, Libya, Libya."

President Barack Obama told the Libyan people: "You have won your revolution."

Although the United States briefly led the relentless NATO bombing campaign that sealed Gadhafi's fate, Washington later took a secondary role to its allies. Britain and France said they hoped that his death would lead to a more democratic Libya.

Other leaders have fallen in the Arab Spring uprisings, but the 69-year-old Gadhafi is the first to be killed. Bloody images of Gadhafi's last moments raised questions over how exactly he died after he was captured wounded, but alive. Video on Arab television stations showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling Gadhafi, with blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt.

Gadhafi struggled against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters pushed him on to the hood of a pickup truck. One fighter held him down, pressing on his thigh with a pair of shoes in a show of contempt.

Fighters propped him on the hood as they drove for several moments, apparently to parade him around in victory.

"We want him alive. We want him alive," one man shouted before Gadhafi was dragged off the hood, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance.

Later footage showed fighters rolling Gadhafi's lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head. His body was then paraded on a car through Misrata, a nearby city that suffered a brutal siege by regime forces during the eight-month civil war that eventually ousted Gadhafi. Crowds in the streets cheered, "The blood of martyrs will not go in vain."

Thunderous celebratory gunfire and cries of "God is great" rang out across Tripoli well past midnight, leaving the smell of sulfur in the air. People wrapped revolutionary flags around toddlers and flashed V for victory signs as they leaned out car windows. Martyrs' Square, the former Green Square from which Gadhafi made many defiant speeches, was packed with revellers.

China failed to give the green light to Libyan rebel fighters who came under heavy attack from the Gadhafi regime. - AP photos