Fighting raged Wednesday near Moamer Kadhafi’s Bab al-Azizya compound a day after it was captured by rebels, as loyalist troops staged a fightback and the strongman boasted he went walkabout.
Thick smoke hung over the Bab al-Azizya complex, where rebels and Kadhafi’s forces were fighting early afternoon with light weapons, heavy machineguns, rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and mortars, an AFP reporter said.
Fighting also spread to the nearby Abu Slim area, where loyalist troops were on the attack, in marked contrast to Tuesday’s battle for Bab al-Azizya when they fled as the rebels breached the gates.
Rebel commanders said however they were determined to push the loyalist troops out of the area, which houses the Rixos hotel where around 30 foreign journalists remain trapped.
Many streets were deserted in the city centre, with commanders saying dozens of pro-Kadhafi snipers have taken up positions.
“There are snipers above and around the perimeter of Bab al-Azizya; there are dozens of them but we don’t know where they are,” said the chief of a rebel group, Nuri Mohammed.
Two powerful blasts thought to be caused by an air attack rocked the capital early Wednesday as a NATO warplane flew overhead.
The whereabouts of the strongman himself and his family remained a mystery on Wednesday.
Rebel fighters said they had found no trace of Kadhafi when they swarmed through his compound on Tuesday, raiding his armoury, raising their flag and ripping the head off a statue of the strongman.
“Bab al-Azizya is fully under our control now. Colonel Kadhafi and his sons were not there; there is nobody,” said military spokesman Colonel Ahmed Bani “No one knows where they are.”
Wherever he may indeed be, the strongman is still managing to get his messages out.
In a speech carried early Wednesday by the website of a television station headed by his son Seif al-Islam, he said he had abandoned his compound in a “tactical withdrawal” after it had been wrecked by NATO warplanes.
“Bab al-Azizya was nothing but a heap of rubble after it was the target of 64 NATO missiles and we withdrew from it for tactical reasons,” he said.
The speech gave no indication of where he had gone.
In a later audio message on Syria-based Arrai Oruba television station, Kadhafi boasted that he had taken to the streets of Tripoli without being recognised.
“I walked incognito, without anyone seeing me, and I saw youths ready to defend their city,” the strongman said, without specifying when he did his walkabout.
He also urged “the residents, the tribes, the elderly to go into the streets… and cleanse Tripoli of rats” — referring to the rebels.
Kadhafi spokesman Mussa Ibrahim claimed to the Arrai Oruba channel that more than 6,500 “volunteers” had arrived in Tripoli to fight for the regime, and called for more.
Insurgents, jumpy but jubilant and armed with assault rifles, combed the streets of the capital Wednesday for remnants of the regime.
“We are the champions. We’ve been dying for 42 years and now we are going to live,” said Sharif Sohail, a 34-year-old dentist who took up arms to patrol the city centre.
Other rebel fighters, some wrapped in Free Libya flags, some wearing flackjackets, manned checkpoints through the night, scrutinising traffic by flashlight in neighbourhoods without electricity.
“We are checking every car that passes,” Brahim Mukhtar, 27, told AFP at a main intersection near Souk al-Fatah. “We are guarding the streets.”
Britain meanwhile is working with allies at the UN to unfreeze Libyan assets blocked by Security Council sanctions, Foreign Secretary William Hague said in London.
“Diplomaticaly we’re engaged at the United Nations and elsewhere to pave the way for the unfreezing of assets,” Hague said, shortly after France confirmed it was seeking a UN resolution to do so.
A British government source said the resolution would include releasing assets to help rebels set up a government and meet urgent humanitarian needs.
In Moscow, President Dmitry Medvedev said Russia would recognise the Libyan rebels if they “unite the country” while warning that Kadhafi, the Kremlin’s old ally, still retained influence.
In his first public comments on Libya since the rebels swiftly stormed its capital, Medvedev tread a cautious line between recognising the change of power in Tripoli and breaking Moscow’s historic ties to the old regime.
“Despite the successes of the rebels, Kadhafi and his supporters still have a certain influence and military potential. We want them to sit down at the negotiating table and reach agreements on future peace,” Medvedev said.
The attack on Kadhafi’s headquarters followed three days of fighting in the capital which Mustafa Abdel Jalil, chairman of the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC), said had left more than 400 killed and 2,000 wounded.
He did not specify if he was talking of both sides.
Not far from Wednesday’s fighting, some 30 foreign journalists were still unable to leave their hotel after four days of siege.
“It’s getting pretty miserable here and you can only imagine the sort of tension which the foreigners here, the journalists here, find themselves feeling at the moment,” BBC correspondent Matthew Price told BBC radio.
Wednesday morning, some of the journalists attempted to venture a few metres (feet) from the hotel before gunfire erupted nearby and armed men ordered them to return to the Rixos.
Electricity, temporarily cut, has been restored, but water remains scarce. Mobile phone signals are poor and food is in short supply.
