Pressure piled on Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi Tuesday as his oil minister appeared to have defected, Moscow issued a rebuke, NATO jets pounded Tripoli and a leading prosecutor sought his arrest for crimes against humanity. A Tunisian government source told AFP that Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem, a veteran of Moamer Gaddafi’s regime, has left his country and is in neighbouring Tunisia.
Ghanem, also the chairman of Libya’s powerful national oil company, crossed the border by car on Saturday and is staying in a hotel in the southern tourist island of Djerba, the official said on condition of anonymity. If it is confirmed the minister has left his post, he would be among the most senior officials to abandon Gaddafi’s government amid an uprising that erupted in mid-February. Former foreign minister Mussa Kussa defected to Britain in March, leaving Libya via Tunisia.
In Moscow, meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he held talks Tuesday with Gaddafi’s envoys and had told Tripoli to obey the terms of UN resolutions on Libya. The visit to Moscow by Muhammad Ahmed al-Sharif, general secretary of the World Islamic Call Society, the Libya-based group founded by Gaddafi, comes as Russia is also preparing to hold talks with rebels fighting the regime.
“We raised the issues that directly come out of our principal position aimed first and foremost at urgently ending bloodletting in Libya,” Lavrov said after talks with Sharif. “We raised an issue about the need for the Libyan leadership to explicitly embrace and begin the implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions in full,” Lavrov said. “These resolutions demand that any use of military force against peaceful civilians be stopped.”
Moscow, which has been strongly critical of the international campaign against Gaddafi’s regime, had agreed to talk to both Gaddafi’s envoys and rebels who had also planned to come to Moscow but had to delay their trip. Overnight, air strikes by NATO set fire to two buildings near Gaddafi’s compound in the Libyan capital, according to an AFP reporter who along with other journalists was taken by the Libyan authorities to the site, where firefighters battled the flames.
Parts of Tripoli have been targeted almost daily by NATO-led strikes launched on March 19 after a UN resolution mandated a no-fly zone and called for the protection of civilians from Gaddafi’s regime.
