Burial delay

Officials at one point declared the show was over, closed the gates and started turning people away. "That's enough," said one of the guards, "He's been causing us as much trouble dead as he did alive." But within an hour, there was a change of plan as dozens more sightseers arrived and were shown in.

The killings near Sirte, after cellphone video footage was taken showing the captive Gadhafi being beaten and mocked by fighters apparently from Misrata, are also a matter of controversy - at least outside Libya. The United Nations human rights arm has joined the Gadhafi family in seeking an inquiry.

NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil told a news conference on Monday that the NTC had formed a committee to investigate.

He also indicated that the interim authorities still held to an official line that Gadhafi may have been killed in "crossfire" with his own men, a view many NTC officials themselves seem ready to discount.

"Those who have an interest in killing him before prosecuting him are those who had an active role with him," said Abdel Jalil, who like many of the new leadership held positions of authority under Gadhafi.

Adding to concerns about Libya turning over a new leaf on respect for individuals, New York-based Human Rights Watch called on the NTC to probe an "apparent mass execution" of 53 people, apparently Gadhafi supporters, whom it found dead, some with their hands bound, at a hotel in Sirte.

Few Libyans seem troubled either about how Gadhafi and his entourage were killed or why their corpses were displayed for so long in what seemed a grim parody of the lying-in-state often reserved for national leaders.

"God made the pharaoh as an example to the others," said Salem Shaka, who was viewing the bodies in Misrata on Monday.

"If he had been a good man, we would have buried him. But he chose this destiny for himself."

The killing of fallen autocrats is far from a novelty. In Europe in living memory, similar fates befell Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania in 1989 and Benito Mussolini, who had created modern Libya as an Italian colony a decade before he died in 1945.

However, some of the anti-Gadhafi rebels' Western allies have expressed disquiet about the treatment of Gadhafi after his capture and after his death, and worry that Libya's new leaders will not uphold their promise to respect human rights.

"They were not pleasant images," said British Prime Minister David Cameron, an early supporter of the rebellion.

"Everyone understands that is not what should have happened. It should have ended in a trial and should have ended in Gadhafi facing justice," Cameron told parliament in London.

As their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbours whose uprisings inspired Libyans to revolt held or contemplated free elections, fellow Arabs also voiced distaste at Gadhafi's treatment, even though sympathy for the fallen strongman was in short supply.

"Forty-two dark years under a merciless dictator has naturally left the Libyan people very damaged," said Mahmoud Nofal, a 36-year-old bank employee in Cairo.

"It has driven them mad for revenge. The rotting body is just emblematic of the rotten political and social environment under Gadhafi."