Tuesday, 26 April 2011
A Kingdom of Libya flag is seen at the southern Libyan and Tunisian border crossing of Dehiba. (File photo)
Five loud explosions rocked the eastern part of the Libyan capital Tripoli late on Monday night, witnesses said.
“We heard three loud explosions and we saw flames and smoke billowing close to us,” a resident of Ain Zara neighborhood in eastern Tripoli told Agence-France Press.
Two other detonations shook the same neighborhood a few minutes later, another witness said.
Later, al-Jamahiriya TV said NATO had raided civil and military targets in the Ain Zara district and at Bir al-Ghanam, 50 kilometers (30 miles) to the southwest.
The television station quoted a military source as saying there had been victims, but gave no number.
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s office in his sprawling Tripoli residence was destroyed in a NATO air strike early on Monday, while loud explosions were heard in several districts of the capital as warplanes roared overhead.
A Libyan government spokesman denounced Monday’s bombing as a failed assassination attempt, saying the 69-year-old leader was healthy, “in high spirits,” and carrying on business as usual, according to The Associated Press.
A separate airstrike elsewhere in Tripoli targeted Libyan TV and temporarily knocked it off the air, a government spokesman said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Since an armed uprising erupted in mid-February, Mr. Qaddafi has been clinging to control in the western half of Libya, while opposition forces run most of the east.
A NATO campaign of airstrikes has sought to break a battlefield stalemate, and the US last week added armed US Predator drones to the mission. Italy said Monday its military would join in strategic bombing raids in Libya.
In Brussels, NATO said Monday “the target was a communications headquarters that was used to coordinate attacks against civilians.”
Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said three people were killed and 45 wounded, 15 of them seriously, by the airstrikes. He did not elaborate and turned down a request to arrange interviews with the wounded.
Colonel Qaddafi’s forces unleashed new shelling Monday on Misrata that killed at least 10 people, following a weekend pounding that belied government claims its troops were holding their fire as they withdrew from the western city that has been besieged for nearly two months.
Among the dead from a shattered residential neighborhood was an entire family, a doctor in Misrata told AP. Mourners later carried six crudely constructed coffins of family members, plus one child who had been visiting, to a funeral near a mosque.
Misrata is Libya’s third largest city with an estimated population of 550,555 out of Libya’s total population of 5.5 million
The assault on Misrata, which has claimed hundreds of lives, has deepened Mr. Qaddafi’s international isolation. It has also prompted new demands that Libya’s ruler of 41 years be ousted as part of the international bombing campaign.
Colonel Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, claimed that his father has “millions of Libyans with him,” and said NATO's mission was doomed to fail.
“In history, no country has achieved victory with spies and traitors and collaborators. ... NATO, you are the losers,” he was quoted as saying by the state news agency JANA.
(Abeer Tayel of Al Arabiya can be reached at: abeer.tayel@mbc.net)
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