LONDON – As the death toll in anti-government protests in Libya since Tuesday reached at least 173 on Sunday, Islamist gunmen stormed a military arms depot in Libya and a nearby port and seized numerous weapons and army vehicles after killing four soldiers, a security official said.
“There are 173 dead,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) spokesman Tom Porteous said. “It’s a conservative figure based on hospital sources in eastern Libya, Benghazi and three other places. It is a very incomplete figure and there are also a very large number of injured. “According to medical sources in Libya the wounds are indicative of heavy weapons being used against the demonstrators,” Porteous added.
The group also took several hostages, both soldiers and civilians, and is threatening to execute them unless a siege by security forces is lifted in Al-Baida, the official told AFP, asking not to be named. “This criminal gang assaulted an army weapons depot and seized 250 weapons, killed four soldiers and injured 16 others” in the Wednesday operation in Derna, which lies east of Al-Baida and 1,300 kilometres from Tripoli.
“Army Colonel Adnan al-Nwisri joined them and provided them with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, three pieces of anti-aircraft artillery and 70 Kalashnikov” assault rifles, the source said. On Friday, he said they attacked the port in Derna and seized an assortment of 70 military vehicles. It was not immediately clear who the civilians were or where they had been taken hostage.
The group calls itself the “Islamic Emirate of Barqa”, after the ancient name of a region of northwest Libya, and the official said its leadership is made up of former Al Qaeda fighters previously released from jail. Tens of thousands gathered in Benghazi on Sunday for funerals of protesters killed by Libyan security forces as Human Rights Watch said overnight violence had doubled the death toll from four days of clashes to 173.
The unrest, the worst in Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s four decades in power, started as a series of protests inspired by popular revolts in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, but was met by a fierce response. Reporters have not been allowed into Libya’s second city but piecemeal accounts suggest its streets are largely under the control of anti-government protesters, who periodically come under attack from security forces firing out of their high-walled compound.
“A massacre took place here last night,” one Benghazi resident who did not want to be named told Reuters over telephone on Sunday. He said security forces had used heavy weapons, adding that “many soldiers and policemen have joined the protesters”. Another resident of Benghazi, about 1,000 km (600 miles) east of the capital Tripoli, told Reuters that “some 100,000 protesters are now heading for a cemetery to bury dozens of martyrs”.
Another witness, a leading tribal figure who requested anonymity, said security forces were confined to their compound. “The state’s official presence is absent in the city and the security forces are in their barracks and the city is in a state of civil mutiny,” he told Reuters. “People are running their own affairs.”
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said about 90 people had been killed on Saturday in clashes in Benghazi and surrounding towns running into the night, taking the death toll from four days of violence to 173.
