Another one gone, nearly

David Kirkpatrick and Rod Nordland have an article in The New York Times about the imminent death of the Lockerbie mastermind:

An official with the rebel government ruled out extraditing the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted as the mastermind of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and released from a Scottish prison two years ago on the ground that he was near death. The hero’s welcome back in Libya for the bombing planner, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, and his failure to die infuriated the United States and other Western governments, and calls for his return had been mounting as the Libyan revolution unfolded.
The rebels’ resolve to protect the former officer may prove only briefly relevant, however. Just hours after the official spoke, CNN reported that Megrahi was near death at his villa in Tripoli, broadcasting images of a frail man lying comatose in an oxygen mask.
Megrahi’s death would end the possibility of eliciting his full account of the Libyan government’s role in the bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, 189 of them Americans. But it would also remove a potentially serious point of friction between the rebels’ Transitional National Council and its Western backers.
Politicians and lawmakers in the United States had begun calling for his return to finish answering for the bombing. But the justice minister of the transitional council equated an extradition of Megrahi with a betrayal characteristic of the hated and fugitive dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“al-Megrahi has already been judged once and he will not be judged again,” the minister, Mohammed al-Alagi, told reporters in Tripoli, according to Reuters. “We do not hand over Libyan citizens,” he added. “Qaddafi does.”
Less than eight hours later, Nic Robertson of CNN reported having found Megrahi at the villa, where his family said that it was caring for him without help and that he was dying. “We just give him oxygen,” the report quoted Megrahi’s son, Khaled, as saying. “Nobody gives us any advice. There is no doctor. There is nobody to ask. We don’t have any phone line to call anybody.”
The rebels added to their military gains, saying that they had captured Bin Jawwad, a strategic eastern hamlet that has in the past been a stumbling block on their path toward Surt, the dictator’s hometown and one of his last strongholds.
They also announced that two oil fields would restart production within a few weeks, with exports of crude likely to resume from the oil terminal in the eastern port of Tobruk by the end of September, Reuters reported. But refineries remained closed, the rebels said, so fuel will still have to be imported.
In Tripoli, the transitional council continued to struggle to restore running water, electrical power, and fuel in the capital, and to provide adequate medical supplies for hospitals packed with wounded, tasks rebel leaders acknowledge will help make or break the legitimacy of their new government.
Officials working to restore water said that as Qaddafi forces retreated from Tripoli, hundreds of desert wells that pump water to it and much of the western coast had somehow been shut off. Restarting the pumps can be done only manually, but the threat of Qaddafi fighters’ continuing presence is keeping crews away. “They are not yet able to move because the area is not safe yet,” said Aref Nayed, a member of the council and a leader of its Tripoli stabilization team, adding that he believed the restart would be “days, not weeks”.
Nayed said that the United Nations had agreed to send five million liters of bottled water— about two and a half liters for each Tripoli resident— and that some was already being distributed through mosques around the city. He said that two boatloads of aid had arrived, and that the provisional government had re-opened an airbase to receive cargo planes as well. Rebel fighters were close to securing Tripoli International Airport, he said.
In a symbolic transition, Libyan state television is set to begin rebroadcasting again, Libyan radio reported, under the control of the rebels it denounced until just a week ago as foreigners, terrorists and rats.
With rebel gains on a variety of fronts— accompanied by another unverified report of the death of Khamis el-Qaddafi, the son who commands a feared private brigade— Colonel Qaddafi made an offer to negotiate that was swiftly rejected. The offer, relayed by the colonel’s chief spokesman in a phone call to The Associated Press, was to have another son, Saadi el-Qaddafi, lead talks on a transitional government. “I would like to state, very clearly, we don’t recognize them,” Mahmoud Shammam, the council’s information minister, said of the remaining Qaddafi officials in a news conference covered by the A.P.. “We are looking at them as criminals. We are going to arrest them very soon. Talking about negotiations is a daydream for what remains of the dictatorship.”
The possibility of Khamis el-Qaddafi’s death has been reported before. On Sunday, a rebel leader, Colonel Ahmed Bani, said at a news conference that attempts were under way to identify the dead from a confrontation on Saturday about fifty miles from Tripoli, but that the captured survivors had identified themselves as bodyguards assigned to protect Khamis el-Qaddafi. The confrontation occurred in Tarhuna, a small city southeast of Tripoli, along a route that connects both to Surt and the loyalist stronghold to the south, Sabha. Bani said that what appeared to be a civilian convoy had tried to speed through a checkpoint, and that men in some of the vehicles had fired on the rebels. The rebels opened fire with heavy weapons, he said, destroying two armored vehicles at the center of the convoy chosen as targets because the other cars seemed to be trying to protect them. The armored vehicles burned, charring the remains of all those inside so badly that so far, no identifications have been made, he said.

Rico says they're trying, but two and a half liters (or about a gallon) won't last long; it is the fucking desert, even in Tripoli, after all. Better to send in a desalinization ship; the US Navy has several...