This article is more than 8 years old

This article is more than 8 years old

Libya's transitional government is to finally declare the country liberated following the capture and killing of the ousted dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Military official Abdel-Rahman Busin said the governing National Transitional Council (NTC) had begun preparations for a liberation ceremony on Sunday in the eastern city of Benghazi, birthplace of the Libyan revolution.

The declaration comes as military commanders in Misurata rejected international calls for a post-mortem on Gaddafi's body, amid signs of tension among some of the revolutionary factions.

In another step towards transforming the former dictatorship into a democracy, the interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril said on Saturday that Libyans should be allowed to vote within eight months to elect a national council that would draft a new constitution and form an interim government.

In the meantime, the priority was to remove weapons from the country's streets and restore stability and order, Jibril said at the World Economic Forum in Jordan.

"The first election should take place within a period of eight months, maximum, to constitute a national congress of Libya, some sort of parliament," he said.

"This national congress would have two tasks: draft a constitution, on which we would have a referendum, and the second to form an interim government to last until the first presidential elections are held."

Jibril said that he expected to step down on Saturday, a move he had planned to make once his government took full control of the country.

He also warned Libya's next government not to allow politics to influence the award of oil contracts, saying: "I can advise the coming interim government that the economic rule should be the rule. It's very dangerous to have contracts based on politics."

His comments could be seen as cautioning against giving western powers who intervened in the Libyan civil war any preferrential treatment.

Nato announced last night it would officially end its seven-month operation in Libya on 31 October.

The Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said late on Friday that the 31 October end to the alliance's operation would be confirmed formally next week. Diplomats said Nato air patrols would continue over Libya for the next nine days as a precautionary measure to ensure the stability of the new regime and would be gradually reduced, assuming there were no further outbreaks of violence.

Meanwhile, Libyan authorities face questions from international human rights organisations about Gaddafi's death in Sirte on Thursday.

There appears to be disagreement over what to do with the ousted dictator's corpse, which has been put on display in a refrigerated meat store in Misrata.

Misrata fighters who captured Gaddafi refuse to accept any blame for the killing and have rejected demands for a medical report into the cause of his death.

But NTC officials said they were trying to arrange a secret resting place for his body that would avoid loyalists turning it into a shrine.

Wounds on Gaddafi's body appeared to confirm he was killed in cold blood in the chaotic minutes following his capture . There was a bullet wound on the left side of his head that appeared to have been shot from close range. Blood stains showed another bullet wound to his thorax. His body, subsequently driven to Misrata and publicly paraded, was barefoot and stripped to the waist.

Amnesty International has called on the NTC to investigate. It said that if Gaddafi was deliberately killed, this would be a war crime. The NTC's position is that it will support an investigation because the new Libya is a law-abiding country, but officials seemed sceptical that it was necessary.

Gaddafi's bloodied corpse has become a gruesome tourist attraction and a macabre symbol of the new Libya's problems. Hundreds of ordinary Libyans have queued to see the dead dictator.

One of the biggest challenges facing the interim government in the runup to elections is managing the many tensions between different cities and regions of Libya – Benghazi, Misrata, Tripoli and the Nafusa mountains – all of which will want to stake a claim in any new political order. There is also potential for inter-militia violence and clashes between secularists and Islamists.