Still at large, Gadhafi's options for escape are dwindling

By Oren Dorell, USA TODAY

Updated

As rebel fighters tightened their grip on the Libyan capital Tuesday, strongman Moammar Gadhafi's whereabouts remained a mystery and analysts said his options for escape were dwindling.

"As the noose closes, it tightens his options," says David Schenker, director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy's program on Arab politics. "I think he would leave if he could."

A handful of countries in Africa, Asia and South America might be open to the embattled Libyan leader seeking to avoid capture and the fate of other recently deposed leaders, Schenker says.

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak last month was hauled into a Cairo courtroom on a hospital bed in a steel cage to face murder charges. Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was tried on charges of crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague; he died before the trial ended. Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was tried and executed after he was captured hiding in a spider hole.

The ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Gadhafi and his son, Seif al-Islam.

Al-Islam, who took reporters on a predawn tour of loyalist defenses Tuesday, has promised a fight to the end.

"The leader Moammar Gadhafi is leading the battle and the armed forces are with him," al-Islam said on Libyan national television Saturday. "We will fight till the last man, till the last bullet. We will never leave."

Gadhafi's former right-hand man, who defected last week to Italy, also said the longtime leader would not go easily, according to the Associated Press.

"I think it's impossible that he'll surrender," Abdel-Salam Jalloud said in an interview on Italy's RAI state radio. "He doesn't have the courage, like Hitler, to kill himself."

If Gadhafi does flee, the easiest refuge may be across Libya's southern border into Sudan, where President Omar al-Bashir already is wanted by the ICC to face charges on war crimes in Darfur, Schenker says. He could run to other friends such as Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, or Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, where Gadhafi owns a sizable amount of land, Schenker says.

He says Saudi Arabia, which gave refuge to Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh after he was injured in the Yemeni uprising, would be unlikely to welcome Gadhafi, whom it accuses of backing a 2004 assassination plot against King Abdullah.

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