Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi ruled out giving up power, in comments reportedly made during a chess game, as fighting between his forces and rebels seeking to topple him raged in Libya’s east and west.
Mikhail Margelov, the special envoy of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, said in Moscow on Monday meanwhile he would visit Tripoli next week to hold talks on the Libya conflict. State television broadcast footage of Gaddafi playing chess with head of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who later said he had easily got the better of the Libyan leader on the board during Sunday’s game in Tripoli.
The Russian eccentric who once claimed he hosted extraterrestrials, also sat down for a game of chess with Gaddafi’s son Muhammad and the two played the Sicilian defence, Russia’s Interfax news agency said. “The meeting lasted around two hours, we played some chess with Gaddafi,” Ilyumzhinov, who is on a visit to Tripoli in his capacity as FIDE president, told Interfax.
“Gaddafi stated that he is not going to leave Libya, stressing that it is his motherland and a land where his children and grandchildren died. He also said that he does not understand which post he needs to step down from.”
“I am neither premier nor president nor king. I do not hold any post in Libya and therefore I have no position which I should give up,” Ilyumzhinov quoted Gaddafi as telling him. The chess chief told Moscow Echo radio by telephone on Monday from Libya that he found Gaddafi to be “calm… normal and adequate. We played chess and we talked.”
The chessboard encounter came as fighting between Gaddafi’s forces and rebels raged across Libya, with casualties reported in Zintan and near Brega, and the regime saying it had eliminated resistance in Zawiyah west of the capital. Battles were also being fought in the Berber mountains southwest of Tripoli, in nearby Yafran, and at Dafnia near Misrata, Libya’s third city, rebel sources told AFP. An AFP correspondent said Gaddafi’s forces pounded the outskirts of Zintan on Sunday, killing at least seven rebels.
Government forces posted a few kilometres (miles) east of Zintan, which remains under rebel control, fired Grad and Katyusha rockets at the town.
