Libya was in chaos as the country's military turned its guns on the people, rendering whole cities as battle zones. Anyone venturing outside Monday night was being shot on sight.
As the Moammar Gadhafi regime, apparently led by Colonel Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, tries desperately to hold onto power, the reaction of the people and defections of regime officials reveal the astonishing degree of contempt Libyans have for the man who called himself their "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution."
The dictator appeared briefly on Libyan state television in the early hours of Tuesday morning to address media reports that he had left the country. "I am here to show that I am in Tripoli and not in Venezuela," he said, sitting in a car and holding an umbrella the car door. "Don't believe those misleading dog stations."
As Col. Gadhafi's control slips away, it also becomes apparent that there is no one group or individual in a position to take charge.
In quick succession Monday, Justice Minister Mustafa Abduljelil resigned over the use of military force against the people, two senior pilots flew their fighter jets to Malta rather than follow orders to fire on the people. Ambassadors to India, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Poland and the Arab League resigned to protest the violence used against the demonstrators. The ambassador to the United States announced last evening he too is "with the protesters."
"I can't stand with a government that is killing its own people," Ali Aujali told the BBC.
Libya's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim Dabbashi, accused his own leader of "genocide."
Accompanied by more than a dozen members of Libya's mission to the UN, Mr. Dabbashi told reporters that the government was committing "crimes against humanity" and "war crimes" against the Libyan people.
"We find it impossible to stay silent," Mr. Dabbashi said. "We hear that anyone on the street is being shot."
Diplomats said the UN Security Council, at the request of Mr. Dabbashi, would hold a closed-door meeting on Tuesday morning to discuss the crisis.
In his brief television appearance, the mercurial leader told an interviewer that he had wanted to go to the capital's Green Square to talk to his supporters, but the rain stopped him.
In a state television address early Monday morning, Seif Gadhafi warned of the risk of civil strife with "hundreds of thousands of dead" if protesters don't engage in dialogue with the government. He said the army will "impose security and get things back to normal, whatever the price."
Indeed, on Monday night, state television said that security forces were storming "terror and sabotage hideouts" and urged citizens to help restore security. It warned against "organized gangs that are destroying Libya."
The International Federation for Human Rights said more than 300 people have been killed in the past week of attacks on protesters. Al-Arabiya television said 160 died in violence in Tripoli, the capital.
Seif al-Islam (the name means sword of Islam) is considered the regime's voice of moderation, said George Joffe of Cambridge University. "But in the end he's just as violent as all the others."
How did it come to this? How did Col. Gadhafi, the one-time darling of the world's revolutionaries, become a revolting spectacle to his own people?
True there is unemployment, as in most Arab countries where there is a bulge in the youth population.
And there is the traditional enmity between Libya's eastern Cyrenaica region and the western region of Tripolitania. "They still remember that Gadhafi overthrew King Idris who was born in [Cyrenaica]" said Israeli historian Yaakov Hajaj-Lilof, a specialist on Libyan Jewry.
But when protests started more than a week ago in Benghazi, capital of Cyrenaica, the Brotherly Leader failed to nip them in the bud.
"He ruled with an iron hand," said an experienced Western diplomat in Cairo. "He survived by striking fear in his people."
"But the popular revolution sweeping the region shows the people won't take it any more," he said.
Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, summed up the cause of people's fury in one word: "humiliation." More than economic hardship, it is humiliation that has most rankled the people.
What, however, happens if the Gadhafi regime suddenly ends?
The Brotherly Leader saw to it that there were no political parties in the country; no civil society of any heft.
"Everything is fragmented, there are no obvious leaders," said Prof. Joffe.
Mr. Gadhafi ruled by divide and conquer, concentrating power in his and sons' hands.
The system of rule created by Mr. Gadhafi, called Jamahiriya or rule by masses, is highly decentralized, and run by popular committees in a complicated hierarchical system that leaves the real centre of decision making with the Gadhafis and their top aides.
Fragmentation is a real danger in Libya, a country of deep tribal divisions.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini warned Monday: "I am very concerned about the idea of dividing Libya in two."
Seif Gadhafi had warned of just such a possibility in his televised address. He noted that all of the country's oil is in the east, and most of the population in the west. People will have to fight to keep the two parts together, he said.
"I expect things in Libya to end as they did in Romania," the Western diplomat said, referring to the 1989 demise of the Nicolae Ceausescu regime. "They hunted down and executed the leader," he said.
Indeed, the influential Egyptian Sunni Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa on Monday that any Libyan soldier who can shoot dead Col. Gadhafi should do so "to rid Libya of him."
With a report from Reuters