TRIPOLI: Muammar Gaddafi's love of comic-opera uniforms, exotic female bodyguards and Bedouin tents provided a theatrical backdrop for 42 years of bloody repression that in the end could not withstand a determined uprising backed by Nato air power.

Chased out of Tripoli when rebel forces took the capital last month, Gaddafi disappeared, some said into the empty desert spaces of his vast country.

But on Thursday, senior figures in Libya's interim National Transitional Council ( NTC) announced that the man who had ruled their country was dead, having succumbed to wounds when the former rebels took his home town, Sirte, the last stronghold of fighters still loyal to the ancient regime. In tandem with his eccentricity, Gaddafi had a charisma which initially at least won him support among many ordinary Libyans.

His readiness to take on Western powers and Israel, both with rhetoric and action , earned him a certain cachet with some in other Arab states who felt their own leaders were too supine.

For most of his 42-year rule, he held a prominent position in the West's gallery of international rogues, while maintaining tight control at home by eliminating dissidents and refusing to anoint a successor.

Gaddafi effected a successful rapprochement with the West by renouncing his weapons of mass destruction programme in return for an end to sanctions . But he could not avoid the tide of popular revolution sweeping through the Arab world.

In retrospect, his time had come when he turned his guns on protesters and sent his army to cleanse Benghazi, prompting Western powers and Nato to open up a campaign of aerial bombing that allowed rebel forces to oust him. The Libyan leader, his son and his spy chief are wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for planning the violent suppression of the uprising that began in the east of the country.

As his oil-producing desert country descended into civil war, Gaddafi's military responded with the deadly force that he had never been afraid to use. When the insurgency began in February , protesters were gunned down in their hundreds. As his troops advanced on Benghazi he famously warned rebels there would be "no mercy, no pity" . They would be hunted down "alley by alley, house by house, room by room" . Those words may have been his undoing . Days later the United Nations passed a resolution clearing the way for a Nato air campaign that knocked out his air force, tanks and heavy guns. Raids also targeted his own headquarters in Tripoli. One raid killed his youngest son and three grandchildren. It was not the first time that the West had killed a Gaddafi family member.

US President Ronald Reagan called Gaddafi a "mad dog" and sent warplanes to bomb his Bab al-Aziziyah compound in 1986, after the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque he blamed on Libyan agents.

UN sanctions imposed in 1992 to pressure Tripoli to hand over two Libyan suspects , crippled the economy, dampened Gaddafi's revolutionary spirit and took the sting out of his anti-capitalist , anti-Western rhetoric.