The man Gaddafi

MUAMMAR Gaddafi was born in 1942, the son of a Bedouin herdsman, in a tent near Sirte on the Mediterranean coast. He abandoned a geography course at university for a military career that included a short spell at a British army signals school.He took power in a bloodless military coup in 1969 when he toppled King Idriss, and in the 1970s he formulated his 'Third Universal Theory', a middle road between communism and capitalism, as laid out in his Green Book.He oversaw the rapid development of Libya, which was previously known for little more than oil wells and deserts where huge tank battles took place in World War Two. The economy is now paying the price of war and sanctions.One of his first tasks on taking power was to build up the armed forces, but he also spent billions of dollars of oil income on improving living standards, making him popular with the low-paid.Gaddafi poured money into giant projects such as a steel plant in the town of Misrata - the scene of bitter fighting - and the Great Man-Made River, a scheme to pipe water from desert wells to coastal communities.Gaddafi embraced the pan-Arabism of the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt to join Libya and Tunisia ended in acrimony.In 1977 he changed the country's name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah (State of the Masses).For much of his rule he was shunned by the West, which accused him of links to terrorism and revolutionary movements. He was particularly reviled after the 1988 Pan Am airliner bombing over Lockerbie, by Libyan agents in which 270 people were killed.
Click here to read full news..