MISRATA, Libya—The United Nations’ office for human rights said on Friday the mysterious circumstances surrounding former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s death warrant an official investigation.

“There seem to be four or five different versions of how he died,” said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. “There are at least two cellphone videos, one showing him alive and one showing him dead. Taken together, these videos are very disturbing.”

This developed as the Associated Press reported that Qaddafi’s blood-streaked body was placed on display in a commercial freezer at a shopping center in Misrata on Friday.

Nearly every aspect of Thursday’s killing of Qaddafi was mired in confusion, a sign of the difficulties ahead for Libya. Its new rulers are disorganized, its people embittered and divided. But the ruling National Transitional Council said it would declare the country’s liberation on Saturday, the starting point for a timetable that calls for a new interim government within a month and elections within eight months.

The UN raised concerns that Qaddafi may have been shot to death after being captured alive. The fate of his body seemed tied up in squabbles among Libya’s factions, as fighters from Misrata—a city brutally besieged by Qaddafi’s forces during the civil war —seemed to claim ownership of it, forcing the delay of a planned burial on Friday.

Declaring mission accomplished, Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, meanwhile, said the alliance would begin winding down its aerial campaign over Libya with the aim of ending the operation completely by the end of the month.

“We did what we said we would do, and now is the time for the Libyan people to take their destiny fully into their own hands,” Fogh Rasmussen said at the Nato headquarters in Brussels. Ambassadors from the alliance’s 28 member-states gave preliminary approval to wrapping up Operation Unified Protector by October 31, seven months after it was launched to carry out a United Nations mandate to protect civilians from forces loyal to Qaddafi.

Officials with Libya’s transitional government said Qaddafi’s funeral would be delayed pending an inquiry and a decision on where to bury the former strongman. Officials had planned to bury Qaddafi on Friday, in accordance with Islamic tradition, which generally calls for interment within 24 hours.

Residents of the coastal city of Misrata, which endured a deadly siege by Qaddafi loyalists, lined up on Friday to get a look at Qaddafi’s blood-streaked body laid out on a mattress in a refrigerated room previously used to store produce at a market.

The body was brought to Misrata on Thursday after fighters from the city captured Qaddafi in the fall of his hometown, Sirte.

Colville said there needs to be “an investigation...to ascertain whether Qaddafi was killed in the fighting or after his capture.”

International rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have also called for an inquiry.

A commission on Libya already set up by the UN’s Human Rights Council will probably look into Qaddafi’s death, but other institutions could be involved.

Colville urged Libyans to let justice be served through free and fair trials. Victims of violence during the uprising and throughout Qaddafi’s 42-year rule “have the right to know the truth, to see the culture of impunity brought to an end and to receive reparations.”

(MCT-Los Angeles Times, AP)

Libyan women walk past a graffiti reading: “The greatest crazy of the world” in Tripoli, Libya on Friday. The death on  Thursday of Qaddafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom. AP