AP Photo

It was the news everyone wanted to hear. Late on Sunday evening a fresh volley of tracer rounds arced into the night sky over Benghazi in celebration. “Have you heard?”, my fixer asked, “they’ve got Saif.”

Of course, we’d been there before. On previous stints in the rebel capital I’ve been woken by gunfire at 5am in the morning to be told that Sirte had fallen. Another time there was the rebel pilot who had crashed his jet into Gaddafi’s Baba al-Aziziyah compound. Not a single one of the sons – including Saif – had escaped being killed or captured, according the excitable rebel bush telegraph.