CAIRO/LONDON – Clashes in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Monday left 160 people dead, Arabiya television quoted eyewitnesses as saying. The Arab satellite channel gave the number in a newsflash, without providing further details. Tripoli residents gave conflicting reports on Monday, with some saying they could hear gunfire in the Libyan capital and a political activist telling Al Jazeera warplanes were bombing the city.
“We don’t know what is going on, all we can hear are occasional gunshots,” one resident who lives near the city’s central Green Square told Reuters. Adel Mohamed Saleh, who called himself a political activist in Tripoli, said the aerial bombing had initially targeted a funeral procession. “What we are witnessing today is unimaginable. Warplanes and helicopters are indiscriminately bombing one area after another.”
“There are many dead,” Saleh told al Jazeera television in a live broadcast. There was no independent verification of the report but Fathi al-Warfali, the Libyan activist who heads the Swiss-based Libyan Committee for Truth and Justice, who was taking part in a protest outside UN European headquarters in Geneva, said he had heard the same reports. Also, two Libyan Air Force fighter pilots purportedly defected on Monday and flew their jets to Malta where they told authorities they had been ordered to bomb protesters, Maltese government officials said.
State television reported that Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, had set up a commission to probe “the sad events currently taking place in Libya”, and that it would include “members of Libyan and foreign rights organisations.” “We will take up arms… we will fight to the last bullet. We will destroy seditious elements. If everybody is armed, it is civil war, we will kill each other… Libya is not Egypt, it is not Tunisia.” Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said he had seen some information to suggest Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi had fled the country and was on his way to Venezuela.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon told Qaddhafi in a phone call that the violence “must stop immediately” and called for a broad-based dialogue, a UN spokesman said. US President Barack Obama was “considering all appropriate actions” on Libya. Several Libyan diplomats at the United Nations on Monday joined calls for Qaddafi to stand down.
In Morocco, five bodies were found in a bank set ablaze in unrest that erupted at the weekend after thousands of people demonstrated in several cities for change, the government said on Monday. Another 128 people, including 115 members of the security forces, were injured.
Tripoli clashes claim 160 lives
