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As reports emerge of abuses and alleged killings by both rebels and troops loyal to Col Gaddafi, the United Nations has called on all sides in the conflict to take steps to ensure there are no acts of violence and revenge.
At the same time, the NTC's chairman, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, has urged rebels not to engage in revenge attacks against pro-Gaddafi fighters, threatening to resign if his warning is not heeded.
Slowly but surely, atrocities committed by the Gaddafi regime are being uncovered. In the week and more since Libyan rebels entered Tripoli, horror stories of human rights violations have been emerging.
The UN's rights body (OHCHR) says it is extremely alarmed by the reports of mass killings.
"We are also deeply concerned about reports that there are still thousands of people unaccounted for who were arrested or taken prisoner by Gaddafi security forces either earlier in the conflict, or before it even started," said a spokesperson for OHCHR.
For some in Libya, history is simply repeating itself. In the summer of 1996, stories began to filter out of the country about a mass killing in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that according to Libyan groups outside the country, up to 1,200 prisoners had died. The details were sketchy, however. HRW said the government initially denied that an incident had taken place. Only years later did Col Gaddafi acknowledge that there had been killings at Abu Salim.
The fate of those imprisoned 15 years ago will surely have been on the minds of the Libyans who have disappeared since the current conflict began in February this year.
In the main square in rebel-held Benghazi, families have posted up hundreds of photographs of the missing. It is assumed that many of them had been held in prisons and detention centres by pro-Gaddafi forces.
Human rights groups are now struggling to gather information about what has happened over the past few weeks. It is proving difficult to gauge the scale of the human rights abuses.
