Gaddafi's driver on the endgame: 'He didn't seem to know what to do'

"Everything was exploding," said Nasr, Muammar Gaddafi's personal driver, recalling the moments before the deposed dictator was caught last week. "The revolutionaries were coming for us. He wasn't scared, but he didn't seem to know what to do. It was the only time I ever saw him like that."

Minutes later, euphoric rebels had ended Gaddafi's last stand, over-running the ruined quarter of his birthplace that had served as his final, ignominious refuge.

Nasr said he threw his hands up in surrender as gun-toting rebels approached. He was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt, which blackened his left eye. Gaddafi was being pulled from a drainpipe just before Nasr fell. He caught a final glimpse of his master being swarmed over by rebels. Then blows rained down on them both.

Now, a week later, Nasr and Mansour Dhao, the slain dictator's security chief, seem to be the only surviving members of Gaddafi's old guard who can bear testament to the frantic final days. "If any of the other close staff are still alive, I don't know where they are or what happened to them," said Nasr from his makeshift cell in a Misrata military barracks. The battle for Sirte had left him deaf in his right ear and he leaned forward anxiously to listen to questions. "The rest of them may be somewhere with the revolutionaries or they may be dead," he said.

As some semblance of order begins to emerge from a tumultuous week for the rebels of Misrata and Gaddafi's vanquished loyalists, a picture is taking shape of a dictator who was either defiant or in profound denial – no one seems sure which – until his gruesome death in Sirte.