Anti-Gaddafi fighters launched a fresh assault on Wednesday against the ousted strongman’s remaining holdouts, now pinned into a small corner of his hometown Sirte. The fighting was concentrated in the outer streets of Sirte’s Number Two neighbourhood, with both sides trading heavy gunfire and bombarding each other with mortar shells. Ali al-Rikabi, field commander of the National Transitional Council (NTC), Libya’s new rulers, said fighting was raging in “four or five streets of the neighbourhood.”
“It is intense and we have exchanges of gunfire,” he said, as an AFP reporter saw wounded NTC fighters being hurried out towards a field hospital. There was no immediate information on a latest toll but medics said at least 11 NTC fighters were killed and 95 wounded on Tuesday alone in the battle to subdue the last pockets of support for Moamer Gaddafi in Sirte.
