Pro-Gaddafi 'boy soldier' claims he was shot after rebels captured him

His testimony - told from a hospital bed, inside a prisoner of war camp in Misrata - is one of the first eyewitness accounts from inside rebel territory to allege Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi's forces have been the victims of mistreatment rather than the perpetrators.

Yet his ordeal, told in bursts under his captors' gaze, was also a story of mercy.

The injured youth is allegedly a mercenary from Chad, who had been living in Libya since 2006. He said he was 20, but looked no more than 16, and he claimed Col Gaddafi agents kidnapped in Tripoli and forced him to the front.

When his unit was overrun, in olive groves south of Misrata, his comrades tried to flee. "We could hear the rebels telling us to surrender, but most of the guys didn't want to," he said. "I stopped under a wall and hid."

Three rebels clambered over the wall to detain him. One of them was shot and killed. "They were angry," the prisoner said timidly, "So they shot me."

He pulled back a blanket to reveal four metal pins sticking from his leg. Visible beneath bandages, a dark spot at the top of his thigh was the place where the bullet smashed his femur.

Most of the rebels fighting in Misrata are untrained civilians. They saw friends and relatives killed by indiscriminate artillery bombardments, and foreign mercenaries, particularly black Africans, have been singled out in the rebel narratives for committing the most heinous crimes, including gang rape.

It seems astonishing then, in the heat of battle with a friend just dead, that the rebels didn't simply murder the helpless youth. Instead, they took him to a hospital where was treated alongside their comrades.

Today, he is being treated in a makeshift clinic inside a prisoner of war camp, on the second floor of a converted high school.

There is no doubt both sides have been guilty of mistreatment that amounts to war crime. At least one prisoner I saw had been shot through his foot - to stop him running away.

A mobile phone video, posted on the internet, appears to show two rebel prisoners who have been horrifically beaten by their captors, tightly trussed and writhing on an office floor.

Some rebels admit they want revenge, particularly against the residents of Tuargha, 24 miles to the south of Misrata, whose residents they accuse of committing the worst excesses of the war.But many focus their fury on Gaddafi, and insist he is to blame for pitting Libyan against Libyan.

"Gaddafi didn't respect the Geneva Conventions, but we are different," said a prison interrogator, who insisted no photographs should identify the prisoners, for their own protection.

Although it was impossible to know how much was laid on for my visit - arranged 24 hours in advance - the prison was clean and inmates showed no obvious signs of recent abuse. Fighters said there were other jails, including one for suspected spies, closed to visiting journalists.

The governor, Sheikh Abdul Hafeed Abu Grain, said there were 126 inmates in his prison. They ranged from teenagers to pensioners and they were overwhelmingly Arab Libyans.

They sleep in classrooms, on foam mattresses, roughly 20 to a room. There are metal grates on the windows but the doors weren't locked when I visited, and none of the men were physically restrained.

They painted a picture of an army in disarray. At one point during a two-hour visit, I was surrounded by almost 20 inmates in a corridor, competing to explain how they had been tricked into fighting by Col Gaddafi's lies.

"They told us we were going to save Misrata," said a soldier who volunteered 15 years ago because he needed a job. "But two days after we arrived we realised the people looked Libyan. We could hear them praying in the mosques, they didn't look like terrorists."

Rebels said some of the inmates have confessed to multiple rapes and looting, although the guards refused to identify them. Eventually, Sheikh Grain said, those men would stand trial: "Once Gaddafi is gone."