Who?

Muammar Qaddafi (New Yorker)

Moammar Gadhafi (Globe and Mail)

Muhammar Gheddafi (Corriere Della Sera, Italian national business daily)

Moammar Gaddafi (Voice of America)

Muammar Gaddafi (Time)

Moamer Kahafi (Agence France Presse)

This guy's been in power for 42 years, and still we can't agree on his name?

Update

So it's not just me. The Christian Science Monitor online (actually, CSM scrapped its print edition a few years ago, so that's redundant) just posted this:

Gaddafi? Kadafi? Qaddafi? What's the correct spelling?

You say, Gaddafi, we say Qaddafi. Other variations on the leader of Libya include "Gathafi," "Kadafi," and "Gadafy," creating an unholy mess for newspaper editors.

 
(AP)

 

Comments

[Darwin O'Connor]

The answer is perfectly simple:

معمر القذافي

[Wascally Wabbit]

Kudos to Darwin - with a little more explanation!
There are 36 letters in the Arabic Alphabet - and several of them sound similar or as modified sounds compared to the English closest equivalent.
That means - when you pronounce your name in Arabic to someone who doesn't ask you how you spell it - they will write phonetically what they heard -in Arabic.
Then - to translate - or transliterate - into English - further variants can occur.
I worked in support of the White Pages project when Bell Canada was setting up a telephone company for the Saudi government.
Saudi Arabia has two official languages - Arabic and English - and we produced the directory in both - English from the front - left to right - and Arabic from the back - right to left - meeting in the middle of course!
One classic problem - the Royal Family name is Abdul Aziz - but - because of all of the above - we had Princes scattered right through the "A"s - simply because of all the ways that Abdoul Azeez can be spelt!
To make it worse - there are no equivalents - there are some letters in English that have no Arabic equivalent.
As a result - all my official documents - and all my Arabic friends - have always referred to me as Baul - there is no "P"!