In three darkened rooms at the back of a Tripoli hospital, Gaddafi's wounded lay awaiting their fate.

Some writhed in agony, steel pins holding together their shattered bones; some lay, mummy-like, in bandages and plaster. Others shrouded themselves in olive-green blankets – shutting out the world. All 93 of the men in Mitiga hospital had a story to tell and some felt the time to speak openly had finally come.

"I was a normal soldier in the national army," said Ali Ahmed. "I understood things wrongly." Why was he fighting for Gaddafi? "In the end," he said simply, "he wasn't the man we thought he was."

Alongside him another former soldier, Khaled Khalifa, nursed a broken leg. He had the resigned gaze of a man who knew the game was up. He had been captured the day before while fighting in the district of Abu Selim, which meant he had fought on for five days after the rebels stormed Tripoli.

His reason for defending the regime was simple. "If you are a military man, you fight," he said, "but I wish I hadn't now. What we have seen there are no words to explain."

Next door, past two young rebel guards who posted to keep vigilantes away, Ahmed Farat rolled his head from side to side, a vacant expression on his face. He seemed to think insanity was his best defence. "I'm crazy, you know," he said. "Crazy."

The man next to him, a Senegalese national named Ali Senegal, said he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was shot in the back of the neck in Abu Selim on Wednesday.

"I swear by God I'm just a worker," he said. The right side of his face had ballooned to twice its normal size and his jaw was clearly broken.

"No he's not, said Farat. "He knows what he is, he is a sniper."

"You swear by God, do you?" asked a hospital supervisor. "You were caught with a weapon. You were a sniper and we all know that."

There were three other non Libyans in the hospital, men from Mali, Niger and Uganda – all of them with a fate less sure than the wounded members of what was once a standing army. "We treat everyone the same here," said one physician. "I don't ask where they're from, or what they have done. We just treat them."

However, in a small room near the bloody emergency room, another rebel had been posted to keep watch on four other alleged Gaddafi men, one of them the Ugandan, who lay on a stretcher, his hands cuffed to a rail with plastic and blood seeping from a bullet wound near his ankle. He looked terrified.

Across from him was a gaunt man in soiled pants who refused to utter a word to anyone. "We don't think he's Libyan," said Dr Mohammed Hassan. "But the one next to him is."

The man he pointed to had a black eye and a shattered left shoulder. "I was just walking home when I got shot," the injured man said.

Dr Hassan stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. "Liars, all of them," he said, as he walked away to treat another man with a gunshot wound – this time one of the "good guys" – a man from nearby Souk al-Jummah who had been nursing a wound at home for the past week.

More than five days since the collapse of Gaddafi's military, the wounded are still streaming into Tripoli's hospitals. But many – perhaps hundreds – are staying away from state institutions, fearful of reprisals at the hands of rebels.

In Abu Selim, a group of five severely wounded soldiers of the Gaddafi regime cried out to visiting reporters from the second floor of a ruined fire station, which had been used as a field hospital until recent days.

Several more soldiers lay dead on the ground floor, along with another couple with less severe wounds.

The news crews took the wounded men to hospital. As they passed checkpoints manned by young rebels, the Gaddafi loyalists were heckled – particularly the black Libyans among them.

Gaddafi's men are clearly taking a risk by seeking treatment, but it is a risk that those already at Mitiga hospital seem happy to have taken. "I could not stay away from treatment with a wound like this," said Ahmed Fatfat, pointing at his fractured leg and the bullet wound in his abdomen. "I had been in the military for only 20 days. I joined because I believed in Libya. I believed Gaddafi. We were told we were fighting terrorists, al-Qaida, all of the things we now know to be wrong."

The medical staff seemed to warm to him. Indeed, there is a sense that regular soldiers who did what they were told will be forgiven.

"Let them go to their houses, to their families," said Mehdi al-Sagaigi. "They followed Gaddafi like blind men. They didn't think. All Gaddafi's supporters were like that. But the mercenaries, damn them," he said. "Send them to a court. That is the best that they can hope for."

Back inside the ward, a hospital worker gave his mobile phone to another wounded soldier so he could call his wife.

"See, they look after us," said Khalifa, playing to the doctors standing nearby. "They give us food and water and they know that we were just people doing what we thought was right. I have other friends who are wounded. Give me the phone and I will tell them to come to this hospital too."