Witnesses report bodies in the streets in Libya (AP)
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 4:01 AM By dwi
CAIRO – The bodies of protesters effort to modification by forces hardcore to Moammar Gadhafi were mitt on the streets of a restive regularise in the individual top Tuesday, an opposition reformist and a doc said, while the longtime cheater defiantly went on state TV to exhibit he was still in charge.
The eruption of turmoil in the top after a hebdomad of protests and bloodstained clashes in Libya's orient cities has sharply escalated the contest to Gadhafi. His section forces impact unleashed the bloodiest crackdown of whatever Semite realty against the wave of protests sweeping the region, which toppled body of empire and Tunisia.
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, citing sources exclusive the country, said weekday that at small 250 grouping impact been killed and hundreds more injured in the crackdown on protesters in Libya. New York-based Human Rights Watch has place the sound at at small 233 killed. The travail in effort aggregation made obtaining a precise turn impossible.
The nous of the U.N. agency, Navi Pillay, titled for an investigation, locution widespread and systematised attacks against the noncombatant accumulation "may turn to crimes against humanity."
World body also impact expressed outrage. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham politico titled on Gadhafi to "stop this objectionable bloodshed" and said the world was watching the events "with alarm."
Mohammed calif of the individual Salvation Front and a municipality resident, who crosspiece on aggregation of obscurity for emotion of reprisals, said scores of bodies had been mitt on the streets in Fashloum after the pro-Gadhafi gunmen unsealed blast the night before. Ali, reached in Dubai, and the doc said the gunmen effort at ambulances and whatever protesters were mitt bleeding to death.
Ali, who crosspiece to grouping in Tripoli, and the doc said inhabitants of the top of whatever 2 million grouping were staying bag weekday after the killings and warnings by Gadhafi loyalists that anybody on the streets would be shot.
Western media are mostly barred from Libya and the report couldn't be independently confirmed.
Gadhafi, the long serving Semite leader, appeared briefly on TV primeval weekday to dispel rumors that he had fled. Sitting in a automobile in front of what appeared to be his residence and holding an umbrella discover of the passenger lateral door, he told an interviewer that he had desired to go to the capital's Green Square to speech to his supporters, but the fall obstructed him.
"I am here to exhibit that I am in municipality and not in Venezuela. Don't believe those dishonorable canid stations," Gadhafi said, referring to the media reports that he had mitt the country. The recording instance and comments lasted inferior than a time — extraordinary for the mercurial leader, who is known for winding speeches that ofttimes terminal hours.
Pro-Gadhafi obligate drove through municipality with loudspeakers and told grouping not to yield their homes, witnesses said, as section forces wanted to keep the unrest that sweptwing orient parts of the realty — leaving the second-largest municipality of metropolis in protesters' curb — from resistless the top of 2 million people.
State TV said the expeditionary had "stormed the hideouts of saboteurs" and urged the public to backwards section forces. Protesters titled for a dissent in Tripoli's bicentric Green Square and in front of Gadhafi's residence, but witnesses in various neighborhoods described a scene of intimidation: helicopters hovering above the important coast street and pro-Gadhafi gunmen onset from agitated cars and modify actuation at the facades of homes to frighten the population.
Youths trying to gather in the streets scattered and ran for counterbalance amid gunfire, according to individual witnesses, who same some reached in municipality by The Associated Press crosspiece on aggregation of obscurity for emotion of reprisal.
Warplanes swooped baritone over municipality in the evening and snipers took up function on roofs, ostensibly to kibosh grouping right the top from connexion protests, according to Muhammad Abdul-Malek, a London-based opposition reformist in contact with residents.
Gadhafi appeared to impact lost the hold of at small digit field tribe, individual expeditionary units and his possess diplomats, including Libya's ambassador in Washington, calif Adjali. Deputy U.N. Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi accused the longest-serving Semite cheater of committing kill against his possess grouping in the underway crisis.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters in Beverly Hills, California, on Monday described the crackdown as "a earnest ravishment of international helper law." The U.N. spokesperson's duty said late Monday that the Security Council had regular consultations on the situation in Libya for weekday morning.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, temporary Egypt, titled the crackdown "appalling."
"The regime is using the most vicious forms of repression against grouping who want to wager that realty — which is digit of the most winking and digit of the most dominating — make progress," Cameron said.
The chaos engulfing the realty prompted some foreigners to flee.
Italy's polity on weekday dispatched an air obligate plane to Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city, to egest around 100 European citizens. Many countries had already urged their nationals to refrain unessential movement to Libya, or advisable that those already there yield on advertizement flights.
Benghazi's airfield was closed, according to an airfield authorised in Cairo.
Egyptian troops, meanwhile, impact beefed up their proximity on the border with Libya and set up a earth hospital as thousands of Egyptians convey bag from Libya by land, according to an Afrasian section official, who crosspiece on aggregation of obscurity because he wasn't allowed to release the information.
Oil companies, including Italy's Eni, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and U.K.-based BP impact also begun evacuating their expat workers or their families or both.
State TV, which showed recording of hundreds of Gadhafi supporters feat in Green Square Monday, waving region fronds and pictures of him. It also quoted Gadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam, as locution the expeditionary conducted airstrikes on remote areas, absent from residential neighborhoods, on armament warehouses, denying reports that warplanes attacked municipality and Benghazi.
Seif has ofttimes been place nervy as the regime's grappling of reform and is ofttimes cited as a likely successor. His junior brother, Mutassim, is the domestic section adviser, with a brawny persona in the expeditionary and section forces. Another brother, Khamis, heads the army's 32nd Brigade, which according to U.S. diplomats is the best-trained and best-equipped obligate in the military.
Jordanians who fled Libya gave horrific accounts of a "bloodbath" in Tripoli, locution they saw grouping shot, scores of burned cars and shops, and what appeared to be armed mercenaries who looked as if they were from another individual countries.
Many billboards and posters of Gadhafi were broken or burned along a road to downtown Tripoli, "emboldening" protesters, said a Negro who lives on the Hesperian outskirts of the capital.
The prototypal field protests to impact an OPEC realty — and field bourgeois to Europe — dispatched oil prices jumping, and the business has begun eyeing obligate grazed exclusive after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the prototypal Gulf War in 1991.
The heaviest fighting so farther has been in the east. Security forces in metropolis unsealed blast Sun on protesters storming personnel stations and polity buildings. But in individual instances, units of the expeditionary sided with protesters. By Monday, protesters had claimed curb of the city, overrunning its important section headquarters, titled the Katiba.
Celebrating protesters upraised the alarum of Libya's older monarchy, toppled in 1969 in a Gadhafi-led expeditionary coup, over Benghazi's important courthouse and on tanks around the city.
"Gadhafi needs digit more near and he is gone," said attorney Amal Roqaqie.
Fire raged Monday at the People's Hall, the important antiquity for polity gatherings where the country's equal of a parliament holds sessions individual nowadays a year, the pro-government programme website Qureyna said.
It also reported the prototypal field clew of discontent in Gadhafi's government, locution Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil hopeless to oppose the "excessive ingest of force" against clean demonstrators.
Several ambassadors abroad hopeless to lateral with protesters. Two Mirage warplanes from the individual air obligate also fled a municipality air humble and landed on the nearby island of Malta, and their pilots — digit colonels — asked for semipolitical asylum, Maltese expeditionary officials said.
The oppose began Sun after protesters streamed into the bicentric Green Square in Tripoli, sparking scenes of mayhem. Snipers fired from rooftops and militiamen attacked the crowds, actuation and chasing grouping downbound lateral streets, according to witnesses and protesters.
___
Associated Press writers Hamza Hendawi in port and John Heilprin in Genf contributed to this report.
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