Libya: Gaddafi on the run

Just about everyone is after him.  It isn't just the bounty loot, but a matter of national honour that he's caught or killed.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has fled.  The tyrant had ruled for a world shattering record of 42 years.  Rebel fighters and supporters are hunting him down. The National Transitional Council rebel body has put a price on his head:  dead or alive, a million pounds.  David Cameron, the British prime minister, has authorised around 20 crack SAS troops - who were already in Libya and advising the rebels on their advance into Tripoli - to search and capture the dictator.

The speculation as to where this man has escaped to continues:  in Tripoli, elsewhere in Libya, or already out of the country - Venezuela, Chad, Niger, Mali, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and now Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabwe's regime has openly criticised the NATO help to Libyan rebels.  So, could Gaddafi already be in Harare?  Al Jazeera notes Zimbawe "could be a potential asylum destination for Gaddafi."

The NTC has said the regime will not have been effectively neutered until Gaddafi is found, caught or destroyed.  They must fear his continued unexplained whereabouts could provide folorn hope to loyalists who must engage in the new Libya for it to succeed.

Zimbabwe?  Really?  I suppose he could do a "Lord Lucan" and merely disappear.  Richard Bingham, the British 7th Earl of Lucan - a prolific gambler, was descended from the 3rd Earl, George Bingham, one of several aristocrats reponsible for the fiasco which led to the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, during the Crimean War.  Richard Bingham vanished in 1974 amid a ghastly controversy surrounding allegations he'd murdered his nanny having mistaken her for his wife.  There was subsequent speculation that he'd flown to Brazil (a country which then had no extradition treaty with the UK).  Later suggestions claimed he'd holed up in the discrete tranquility of the isolated farmlands of Namibia or Botswana, where neighbours never tell.  Both countries are close to Zimbabwe.  Richard Bingham was never found, so will they grab Muammar Gaddafi?

Of course, this is pure speculation.  And the dictator still transmits defiant messages broadcast on a loyalist TV station.  Fierce fighting rages amid finds of hidden tank depots and underground warrens of offices and bedrooms beneath Gaddafi's bunker at Bab al-Azizia in Tripoli.  This has some way to play out yet, it seems.

Check out all commentaries here.