The cartoon, displayed on an easel in the lobby of Tripoli's Mahari hotel, raises a smile from patrons checking their AK-47 assault rifles and machine pistols in the wooden gun rack behind the security desk.
Just about no one knows where the former leader is hiding, six weeks after Libya's revolution finally broke his hold on the capital in an operation coordinated with NATO and Arab powers.
His aides and some of his sons scattered to provincial strongholds, where at least two -- Mutassem and Saif al-Islam -- are now believed to be fighting for their survival, respectively in Gaddafi's coastal home town of Sirte and the inland town of Bani Walid.
Of their father, there is little trace.
A bullet-riddled picture of Muammar Gaddafi
hangs on the wall of a cafetaria at a gas station of Bou Hadi town after
anti-Gaddafi fighters took control in Sirte October 3, 2011.
REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih
But by coincidence rather than design, the mocking portrait of Gaddafi in the Mahari, temporary home to senior revolutionary fighters, illustrates neatly the working assumptions that lie behind the manhunt.
Such clues as exist seem to point south, placing the 69-year-old close to the country's southern borders with sub-Saharan Africa.
And, as the drawing suggests, those who are tracking him suspect he is seeking a refuge in a Sahelian or sub-Saharan country, the regions where the man who called himself Africa's "King of Kings" cultivated allies for decades.
A move abroad would place him at risk of arrest by African countries which are signed up to The Hague war crimes court. Many suggest he could outfox his pursuers by hiding in plain sight in an urban setting in Libyan's north -- a tactic employed successfully for years by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden until his killing by U.S. forces in Pakistan in May.
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