Government forces have also suffered heavy casualties in Bani Walid in recent weeks.

BBC: Anti-Gaddafi forces 'seize Sirte'

He had been in the desert outside Bani Walid too.

BBC: My unexpected trip to a Libyan hospital

Canada's Foreign Affairs Department warned last week of "ongoing clashes, including indiscriminate shelling, between pro-government militia and Gadhafi loyalists in Bani Walid, " as well as clashes between armed groups in Sabha and Kufra in the south.

CNN: Benghazi tries to escape its ghosts, past and present

The fall of Sirte, which followed that of the other surviving holdout town of Bani Walid, means that virtually the whole of Libya is in the hands of the forces that took up arms against the colonel in February.

ECONOMIST: Libya��s liberation

Well-armed pro-Qaddafi gunmen in the coastal city of Sirte and the town of Bani Walid, a gateway to the desert interior, have yet to admit defeat, despite being surrounded by far greater numbers of rebel fighters backed by NATO air power.

ECONOMIST: The new Libya

Mr Rabbani says most loyalist forces have already slipped out of Bani Walid, a town of 60, 000 whose capture would place the whole of the country's fertile coastal zone, which contains around 95% of Libya's 6m people, under the control of the new authorities.

ECONOMIST: Libya

In two of them, the colonel's home town of Sirte, along the main coast road, and Bani Walid, 160km (100 miles) south-east of Tripoli, tribal elders seem keen to capitulate but plead for more time to persuade the colonel's diehard supporters to give up.

ECONOMIST: Libya