Did the leader of France kill Gaddafi?

Wow. If you think I have a weakness for conspiratorial scenarios, check out the U.K.'s Daily Mail. The headline: "Gaddafi was killed by French secret serviceman on orders of Nicolas Sarkozy, sources claim." 

A French secret serviceman acting on the express orders of Nicolas Sarkozy is suspected of murdering Colonel Gaddafi, it was sensationally claimed today.

He is said to have infiltrated a violent mob mutilating the captured Libyan dictator last year and shot him in the head.

The motive, according to well-placed sources in the North African country, was to stop Gaddafi being interrogated about his highly suspicious links with Sarkozy, who was President of France at the time.

Earlier this year, a somewhat sensationalistic French news site called Mediapart accused Sarkozy of taking a $65 million campaign donation from Gaddafi in 2007. There was even a Libyan document, bearing a 2006 date stamp, which gave details of the deal. An infuriated Sarkozy labeled this document a forgery and made lawsuit noises against the site, although I don't think anything further came of the matter.

So the question now facing us comes to this: If the Gaddafi/Sarkozy link is just a concoction, then why would Mediapart, the U.K. Daily Mail, and this unnamed Libyan source all try to convey a false impression?

Oddly enough, the Daily Mail published a story in October, 2011 identifying the man who killed Gaddafi. Actually, the name of the killer is not given, although his face is shown. There's something rather fishy about the 2011 story -- it reminds me of some of the less-believable reports we got in the very early days of the Iraq war. But the latest piece in the Daily Mail is also very, very iffy.