TRIPOLI, Libya — Jamila Salem had been up since five a.m., searching Tripoli on Sunday for her missing son, Adel. First, she'd visited the military base that rebels now control in central Tripoli where Adel had been a soldier in the Libyan army. The director of the base's hospital said he didn't know if Adel had been among the wounded who'd been treated there.

Next she went to a school nearby where rebels are holding suspected Gadhafi sympathizers. She gave her son's name and then tearfully waited for word with dozens of other family members who also were searching for missing relatives.

"He disappeared 10 days ago," she sobbed as she recounted the little she knew. As she moved about the city, she clutched a printout of the pre-1977 Libyan flag, the symbol of the revolution, in case anyone questioned the loyalties of a mother of a soldier in the army of deposed Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Underneath the flag were the words "Free Libya."

Libyan rebels who entered Tripoli from three sides last week have taken hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners in the fighting and are now holding them throughout the capital, sometimes in prisons that just a few days ago had held suspected anti-Gadhafi protesters. Perhaps just as often, the jails are makeshift facilities that previously had been schools.

Now the rebel National Transitional Council must figure out what to do with the men in an early test of NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel-Jalil's pledge that the rebels' would not exact retribution on Gadhafi supporters as they seek to remake a country that lived under Gadhafi's mercurial, often brutal, rule for nearly 42 years.

Mohamed al Alagi, the rebels' minister of justice, admitted the transitional council has no idea how many prisoners its forces hold or even how many prisons and holding facilities they operate. He acknowledged that there was very little coordination between revolutionary groups within the city or countrywide and that each individual rebel unit was making its own decisions on what to do with its captives.

Alagi said he hoped to know more on Monday and that judges had been told to report for work to start dealing with the cases.

"Tomorrow the ministry will be working normally, and I will be there," he said.

With no centralized control of the rebels who've poured into Tripoli, often without direct orders to come here, there is widespread worry about the potential for atrocities. Already there is suspicion that many of the dead who lay strewn about the capital in recent days were the victims of execution, not fighting.

At the hospital in Abu Salim, a district that fell to the rebels on Friday, at least 100 bodies were found by medical staff when they arrived at the facility. At least two had been shot in their beds, both apparent members of Gadhafi's military. The other bodies were in such a state of decomposition it was not immediately clear how or when they had died, and there was no way to know immediately who had fired the fatal shots.

At a traffic circle near Gadhafi's Bab al Aziziya headquarters complex, at least two dozen bodies of Gadhafi soldiers were found also on Friday. Many were in their tents, without shoes, as if they'd been asleep. One was shot in the back of an ambulance. Another had been killed on a hospital gurney, an intravenous drip still embedded in his arm.