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Defense minister says French aerial forces hit Kadafi convoy

By Henry Chu
 and David S. Cloud
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REPORTING FROM LONDON AND WASHINGTON -- French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said Thursday that his country’s aerial forces took out the convoy apparently ferrying former Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi out of his collapsing stronghold of Surt.

Longuet said French airstrikes stopped an 80-vehicle convoy trying to escape the city, allowing anti-Kadafi forces to move in on the vehicles.

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There were conflicting reports about how Kadafi was killed.

PHOTOS: Moammar Kadafi | 1942 - 2011

In a statement issued at NATO headquarters in Brussels, the alliance said, ‘NATO aircraft struck two pro-Kadafi force military vehicles which were part of a larger group maneuvering in the vicinity of Surt.’

The statement also said the vehicles ‘presented a clear threat to civilians.’

NATO has maintained since it began a bombing campaign in Libya last March that it was not specifically targeting or tracking Kadafi. But it also carried out numerous attacks on palaces and other facilities he was known to use, including the large government compound in Tripoli where he lived and had offices.

The Pentagon provided armed Predator drones specifically to improve NATO’s ability to track and attack senior figures in the regime who it said were threatening civilians by issuing commands to fighters in the field.

Fathi Bashaga, spokesman for the Misurata military council, said fighters surrounded the pro-Kadafi convoy Thursday and exchanged fire with people in several of the vehicles, according to the Associated Press. Fighters found a wounded Kadafi inside one of the vehicles. He bled to death soon after, Bashaga said.

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-- Henry Chu and David S. Cloud

World Now
Henry Chu

Henry Chu first joined the Los Angeles Times in 1990 and worked primarily out of the San Fernando Valley office before moving to the foreign staff in 1998. He served as bureau chief in Beijing from 1998 to 2003, Rio de Janeiro from 2004 to 2005, New Delhi from 2006 to 2008 and London from 2009 to 2014. He was a 2014-15 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. From 2016-19 he was international editor at Variety magazine. A graduate of Harvard University, Chu returned to The Times in March 2020 as deputy news editor based in London. He left in 2024.

David S. Cloud

David S. Cloud covered the Pentagon, the military and other national issues from the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Los Angeles Times. In his 30-year career, he has also worked at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, where he was a member of a team of reporters awarded a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Sept 11, 2001, terror attacks. He is co-author of “The Fourth Star,” which traces the careers and experiences in Iraq of four U.S. officers.

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