Rebels swept into the capital city earlier this week after a six-month uprising which restricted supply routes and caused dire shortages in parts of the country.

“There will be no more problems with regard to food supplies, medicine supplies and fuel,” National Transitional Council chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil told a news conference in the rebels’ power-base city of Benghazi in the east.

He said there was enough food in Qaddafi’s Tripoli stash to feed a city twice its size — its population is 2 million — and enough medicine for the entire country for a year.

“Muammar Qaddafi intentionally prevented Libyans from getting to these supplies, making them live in hunger,” he said, without giving further details on where the supplies were found or exactly what they contained.

Jalil also said a “great quantity” of fuel had been found at the coastal oil refinery at Zawiya, 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli, which the insurgents captured this month.

Rebels overran Qaddafi’s sprawling Bab Al-Aziziya compound this week after a lightning assault on Tripoli, dealing an apparent death blow to the so-called Brother Leader’s 42-year rule in the North African oil-producing country.

But Qaddafi’s whereabouts remain a mystery and loyalists continue to fight rebel forces in various regions including Tripoli, Qaddafi’s hometown Sirte, his southern desert redoubt of Sabha and parts of the west near Tunisia’s border.

Jalil called on pro-Qaddafi fighters to join the revolution, saying they now had no excuses not to do so.

“The revolution is gaining victory upon victory day by day and they must join,” he said. “There are no more excuses for not joining the revolution.”

He said rebel forces advancing on Sirte from both east and west were hoping to negotiate a surrender of pro-Qaddafi forces to avoid “more killings and more destruction.”

Some major countries are preparing to begin releasing frozen Libyan assets now that Qaddafi looks finished to help the country recover from the fighting. Jalil said those funds would be spent on essential supplies and to pay salaries.

Jalil declined to say when the NTC would relocate to Tripoli, a symbolically important move for a country that has been dogged by regional and tribal rivalry, particularly between the east and the west. He had said on Wednesday the relocation would be completed over the next week.