BROJOL BLOG'S

Mahmoud Jibril, who is acting as prime minister of the rebels’ Transitional National Council, told reporters on Sunday that oil production had begun again, that two months of overdue salaries for state workers would soon be paid, and that negotiations were under way to bring more rebel militias under the direct control of the council.

In recent days, the council has sought to project confidence and control. On Saturday night, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of the council, visited Tripoli for the first time since the ouster of Colonel Qaddafi and called for reconciliation and order. But questions remain about how the winners will share power and deal with former Qaddafi officials and supporters, and loyalist strongholds continue to hold out against the rebels.

Meanwhile, Colonel Qaddafi’s foreign intelligence chief, Bouzaid Dorda, was reported to be in rebel custody on Sunday, even as the government of Niger confirmed that Saadi el-Qaddafi had escaped the rebels’ immediate grasp by crossing the border through the desert. He was in a convoy of about eight people that was intercepted by a Nigerois Army patrol, according to the justice minister, Marou Amadou.

A dozen top officials of the colonel’s government crossed into Niger last week, fueling speculation that Colonel Qaddafi, whose whereabouts remain unknown, would flee to there or to another of the sub-Saharan African countries that benefited from his largess — an outcome dreaded by Libyan rebels, who want to put him on trial.

Saadi el-Qaddafi’s flight from Libya represents a special kind of capitulation. As the Qaddafis pulled together to battle the uprising threatening their power, Saadi was the one member of the family who styled himself a peacemaker. He was the family’s lost soul, a playboy in his youth who was perpetually upstaged by his ambitious older brother Seif al-Islam. He dabbled with careers in soccer, engineering, the military, Hollywood film production and, most recently, real estate development.

On the day the uprising broke out in Benghazi, Saadi was touring the city as an emissary from his father to its alienated citizens. A person who was with him that day said he kept trying in vain to mollify residents with assurances of development or other help from his father. Later, when a Libyan woman was arrested in Tripoli for breaking into a hotel to tell foreign reporters about her rape by Qaddafi militiamen, Saadi interceded — over the objections of many in his father’s government — to help her tell her story to CNN.

After Tripoli fell and the family went into hiding, an associate said, Saadi continued to hope that he could broker a peace agreement or unity government to forestall more bloodshed. He initially presented himself as negotiating on behalf of the family, said his associate and rebels who talked to him. Then, when his brother Seif al-Islam continued to issue fantastic and bellicose statements about a Qaddafi resurgence, Saadi said he was negotiating only on his own behalf. He kept on even after his mother and three of his siblings left the country last week, evidently giving up hope only when rebel fighters moved against the last few loyalist strongholds, like Bani Walid.

In the capital, rebel fighters did get hold of an important Qaddafi official, Mr. Dorda, and planned to hand him over to the Transitional National Council, Reuters reported.

In keeping with the freelance atmosphere of military control in the capital, Reuters journalists said they saw Mr. Dorda, a former prime minister who ran Colonel Qaddafi’s foreign intelligence service, being held in a private house by a rebel unit calling itself the Brigades of the Martyr Abdelati Ghaddour.

Other officials have been captured by different rebel units, or have given themselves up in exchange for safety. One rebel official, Dr. Aref Nayed, the leader of the Libyan Stabilization Team, interrupted an interview on Sunday to take a call, saying, “Someone wants to surrender.”

Getting rebel militias to hand over weapons and prisoners and either integrate themselves into security forces or go home continues to be a challenge, though the council praises them for their restrained behavior.

Mr. Jibril, the acting prime minister, denied rumors of strains between him and Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the commander of one of the most experienced fighting groups. Dr. Nayed said Sunday that the council must balance justice and reconciliation, and would work with bureaucrats from the former government to get the country back to normal as long as they had no blood on their hands.

In Tripoli, residents pitched in to clean up streets, and garbage trucks have reappeared in recent days. At the recently renamed Tripoli University — long called Fatah University after Colonel Qaddafi’s rebellion 42 years ago — students swept courtyards, sang the pre-Qaddafi national anthem and held meetings in each department to plan next steps.

In Niger, Mr. Amadou said the people traveling with Saadi el-Qaddafi were “ordinary folk” and that Mr. Qaddafi was expected to reach the capital, Niamey, sometime this week. There were no plans to arrest him, he said, because there did not appear to be an international arrest warrant for him.