Rebels offer reward in hunt for Gadhafi

TRIPOLI, Libya -- Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2-million bounty on the fallen dictator's head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled yesterday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital, Tripoli.

While pockets of die-hard loyalists kept up the fight to defend Gadhafi, his support was crumbling by the hour, and even his foreign minister said his 42-year rule was over.

Asked by the British broadcaster Channel 4 if a negotiated settlement or safe passage for Gadhafi from Libya were still possible, Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi said: "It looks like things have passed this kind of solution."

Later, Col. Khalifa Mohammed, Gadhafi's deputy of intelligence chief, told Al-Arabiya television that he had defected to the rebels.

In an audio message early yesterday, a defiant Gadhafi vowed from hiding to fight on "until victory or martyrdom." He called on residents of the Libyan capital and loyal tribesmen to free Tripoli from the "devils and traitors" who have overrun it.

Rebel leaders made first moves to extend their political control to the entire country and set up a new government in the capital. During the six-month civil war, opposition leaders had established their interim administration, the National Transitional Council, in the eastern city of Benghazi, which fell under rebel control shortly after the outbreak in February of widespread anti-regime protests.

"Members of the council are now moving one by one from Benghazi to Tripoli," said Mansour Seyf al-Nasr, the opposition's new ambassador to France.

Still, Tripoli was far from pacified, with pro-regime snipers cutting off the road to the airport and other loyalist fighters launching repeated attacks on Gadhafi's captured private compound. Four Italian journalists were kidnapped on the highway to Tripoli around the city of Zawiya, 30 miles west of the capital.

The city's streets were largely empty of civilians. Rebels manned checkpoints every few hundred yards, but little else could be seen but the debris of days of fighting, and weeks of accumulated garbage.

Intense clashes broke out in the Abu Salim neighborhood, a regime stronghold next to Gadhafi's vast Bab al-Aziziya compound, the symbolic center of his regime, which the rebels captured Tuesday after a fierce battle. Gadhafi loyalists inside Abu Salim were firing into the captured compound, rebels said.

Rebels found no sign of Gadhafi after the Tuesday battle for the compound, but rumors churned of his possible whereabouts. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said there was no evidence to indicate he had left Libya, but rebel officials acknowledged they could not find him.

"He might be in Sirte or any other place," Jibril said in Paris. Sirte, a coastal city 250 miles from Tripoli, is Gadhafi's hometown and a bastion of regime support.