Reuters

OBARI, Libya: The chic black sweater and jeans were gone. So too the combat khaki T-shirt of his televised last stand in Tripoli. Designer stubble had become bushy beard after months on the run. But the rimless glasses, framing those piercing eyes above that straight fine nose, gave him away despite the flowing nomad robes held close across his face.

Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, doctor of the London School of Economics, one-time reformer turned scourge of the rebels against his dictator father, was now a prisoner, bundled aboard an old Libyan air force transport plane near the oil-drilling outpost of Obari, deep in the Sahara desert.

The spokesman of the interim government billed it as the “final act of the Libyan drama.” But there would be no closing soliloquy from the lead player, scion of the dynasty that Moammar Gadhafi, self-styled “king of kings,” had once hoped might rule Africa.

A Reuters reporter aboard the flight approached the 39-year-old prisoner as he huddled on a bench at the rear of the Soviet-era Antonov. He sat frowning, silent and seemingly lost in thought for part of the way, nursing his right hand, bandaged around the thumb and two fingers. At other times he chatted calmly with his captors and even posed for a picture.

Gadhafi’s run had come to an end just a few hours earlier, at dead of night on a desert track, as he and a handful of trusted companions tried to thread their way through patrols of former rebel fighters intent on blocking their escape over the border.

“At the beginning he was very scared. He thought we would kill him,” said Ahmad Ammar, one of the 15 fighters who captured Gadhafi. The fighters, from Zintan’s Khaled bin al-Waleed Brigade, intercepted the fugitives’ two 4x4 vehicles 40 miles out in the desert.

“But we talked to him in a friendly way and ... said, ‘We won’t hurt you.’”
Seif al-Islam was the smiling face of Moammar Gadhafi’s power structure. He won personal credibility at the highest echelons of international society, especially in London, where he helped tidy up the reputation of Libya via a personal charitable foundation. He threw that reputation away in the uprising, emerging as one of the hardest of hard-liners against the rebels.

Caught exactly a month after his father met a violent end, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi is wanted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity – specifically for allegedly ordering the killing of unarmed protesters last spring. Libya’s interim leaders want him to stand trial at home and say they won’t extradite him; the justice minister said he faces the death penalty.

His attempt to flee began on Oct. 19, under NATO fire from the tribal bastion of Bani Walid, 160 km from the capital. Ammar and his fellow fighters said they believed he had been hiding since then in the desolate tracts of the mountainous Brak al-Shati region.

Aides who were captured at Bani Walid said Seif al-Islam’s convoy had been hit by a NATO airstrike in a place nearby called Wadi Zamzam – “Holy Water River.” Since then, there had been speculation that nomadic tribesmen once lionized by his father might have been working to spirit him across Libya’s southern borders – perhaps, like his surviving brothers, sister and mother, into Niger or Algeria.

He did not get that far. Ammar said his unit, scouring the desert for weeks, received a tip-off that a small group of Gadhafi loyalists – they did not know who – would be heading on a certain route toward Obari. Lying in wait, they spotted two all-terrain vehicles grinding through the darkness.
“We fired in the air and into the ground in front of them,” Ammar said. The small convoy pulled up, perhaps hoping to brazen it out.

“Who are you?” Al-Ajami Ali al-Atari, the leader of the squad, demanded to know of the man he took to be the main passenger in the group.
“Abdul-Salam,” came the reply. “I am a camel herder.”
It’s a common enough name, though it means “servant of peace” in Arabic; Seif al-Islam’s real name means “Sword of Islam.”

Atari, sizing the man up, took Ammar aside and whispered: “I think that’s Seif.”
Turning back to his Toyota Land Cruiser, Ammar said: “I know who you are. I know you.”
Speaking to journalists Sunday, Atari said that, in the darkness, “Seif jumped out and tried to take cover behind the car.” He then tried to conceal himself under a bundle of clothes, covering it with sand.

“But when we told him to surrender, he did,” Atari said. “The operation was simple and without any resistance or casualties. We treated Seif al-Islam properly. No one laid a finger on him because we are men of honor.”
One of Gadhafi’s companions was wounded in the leg by a ricochet when the snatch-squad fired into the ground, he said, but, aboard the plane, the injury did not appear too serious.

The game was up. The militiamen retrieved several Kalashnikov rifles, a hand grenade and, one of the Zintani fighters said, some $4,000 in cash from the vehicles, as well as a satellite phone.
It was a tiny haul from a man who is suspected by many of holding the keys – in his head – to billions stolen from the Libyan state and stashed in secret bank accounts abroad.

“He didn’t say anything,” Ammar said. “He was scared and then eventually he asked where we are from, and we said we are Libyans. He asked from which city and we said Zintan.” Five prisoners, escorted by about 10 fighters in an array of desert camouflage, piled aboard, ranging themselves on benches along the sides of the spartan hold.

His brown robe, turban and face scarf, open sandals on his feet, were typical of the Tuaregs of the region. The choice of costume offered concealment for a man more commonly seen in sharp suits and smart casual wear.

As they shuffled on the benches, rifle butts scraping on the metal floor, one of the guards said: “He is afraid now.”
The pilot, though, said that he had had a paternal word with the 39-year-old captive and put him at ease before he was brought on board.

“I spoke to him like he was a small child,” said Abdullah al-Mehdi, a diminutive, heavily mustachioed ball of energy in a green jumpsuit. His ambition – typical of Zintanis in these anarchic days in Libya – is to start up a whole new air force.

“I told him he would not be beaten and he wouldn’t be hurt and I gave my word,” he said.
He and the other two crew in the cockpit chain-smoked their way through the flight, navigating over the barren wastes the old-fashioned way, on analogue instruments, with just occasional help from a new GPS device clamped awkwardly to the windshield.

Seif al-Islam by turns stared ahead or turned back to crane his neck out at the land he once was in line to rule. Every so often, holding his scarf across his mouth Tuareg-fashion, he would say a few words to a guard.
The calm was in stark contrast to the frenzy that greeted the capture of Moammar Gadhafi on Oct. 20 as he tried to flee the siege of his hometown of Sirte, on the Mediterranean coast.
Fighters filmed themselves on cellphones hammering the fallen leader before his body was displayed to crowds of sightseers for several days.

The reporter caught Seif al-Islam’s eye a few times, but on each occasion he looked away. At one point he asked for water, and a bottle from the journalist’s pack was passed up to him. After the plane bumped down on the tarmac in the mountains at Zintan, it was surrounded within minutes by hundreds of people – some cheering, some clearly angry, many shouting the rebels’ Islamic battle cry, “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Greatest).

While his companions, clearly nervous, huddled together, Seif al-Islam seemed calm. Asked about The Hague court’s statement that he was in touch through intermediaries about turning himself in to the international judges – who cannot impose the death penalty – he seemed to take offence: “It’s all lies. I’ve never been in touch with them.”
Moving back to speak to the solitary Gadhafi, the reporter asked, in English: “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” he replied, looking up.

The reporter pointed to his injured hand. He said: “Air force, air force.”
“NATO?”
“Yes. One month ago.”
The reporter moved past him to the aircraft steps. Gadhafi looked up and, without a word, briefly took her hand.
Later, television footage showed him being helped off the plane as people among the crowd on the tarmac tried to slap him. His captors shoved him into a car and sped off for a hiding place somewhere in town.