As Mr. Mohamed spoke of defending the Libyan leader, Colonel Qaddafi had vanished into hiding, while his wife Safiya, daughter Aisha and sons Mohammed and Hannibal fled to Algeria on Monday. The spouses of Colonel Qaddafi’s children and their offspring arrived there as well.

But Mr. Mohamed said he fought on, fearful of a future without Colonel Qaddafi.

“This war will happen again, and Libya will experience the same thing that is happening in Egypt,” Mr. Mohamed warned, repeating the series of imagined woes that Colonel Qaddafi’s supporters said had followed the ouster of that country’s strongman, Hosni Mubarak: “Murder and killing and stealing and chaos.”

“What is happening now is because of the rebels, not Qaddafi,” Mr. Mohamed said.

Mr. Mohamed, his leg in a cast and a wound on his back, lay with five other captives in a prison unit of the Mitiga air base hospital, with an armed guard in the hall. Libya’s provisional government calls them prisoners of war, but Mr. Mohamed was the only one who admitted to fighting for Colonel Qaddafi. Two fellow patients said they were migrant workers, from Niger and Somalia, who had been falsely accused of being mercenaries. Another patient, a Libyan, said he had simply been shot in the street. “I am innocent,” he said. Another was handcuffed to his bedrail.

All said they were well treated. During recent visits, hospital staff members brought them special meals just before sunset to break the daylong Ramadan fast, though the seriously sick are not typically expected to keep the fast.

When the rebel captors entered, Mr. Mohamed often abruptly switched the tone of his comments. “Now I think that all Libya is more united,” he volunteered at one point, temporarily contradicting his previous statements for the benefit of his captors.