Security forces have killed more than 80 anti-regime protesters in unrest-swept eastern Libya, Human Rights Watch said yesterday, after Tripoli pledged to crush opposition.
On the fifth day of an unprecedented challenge to his four-decade regime, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had still made no public comment although he reportedly appeared at a mass rally of supporters in the capital last Thursday.
After regime opponents used Facebook to mobilise protests, like in neighbouring Egypt, the social networking website was blocked yesterday and internet connections were patchy, said internet users in Tripoli and Benghazi.
Arbor Networks, a US-based tracker of online traffic, said internet services were cut overnight.
But the capital itself remained calm yesterday, a correspondent in Tripoli said, as state television and the official news agency JANA restricted their coverage to reports of pro-regime rallies.
“Security forces are firing on Libyan citizens and killing scores simply because they’re demanding change and accountability,” said New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), citing phone interviews with hospital staff and witnesses.
It said thousands of demonstrators had poured out onto the streets in Benghazi and other eastern cities last Friday, a day after clashes in which 49 people were killed.
“Hospital sources told Human Rights Watch that security forces killed 35 people in Benghazi on February 18, almost all with live ammunition,” raising the tally to more than 80.
At least 24 were gunned down in Benghazi, Libya’s second city and hotbed of anti-Gaddafi opposition, and in Al-Baida on a ‘day of anger’ last Thursday, according to HRW.
According to a medical source at Benghazi’s Al-Jalaa Hospital and the website of Quryna newspaper, which is close to Gaddafi’s reputedly pro-reform son Seif al-Islam, Friday’s death toll in the city was 24.
Libya’s attorney general, Abdelrahman al-Abbar, has ordered an inquiry into the violence focused on the east of the country, an official in Tripoli told AFP yesterday, on condition of anonymity.
The prosecutor has called for “procedures to be expedited to judge all those who were guilty of death or looting,” the source said.
In Benghazi, demonstrators last Friday set fire to a radio station after the building’s guards withdrew, witnesses and a security source said.
And Quryna reported last Friday that some 1,000 inmates had escaped from a Benghazi prison, while a security source told AFP four inmates were shot dead during a breakout bid in Tripoli.
According to a toll compiled by AFP from local sources, at least 65 people have been killed since demonstrations first erupted last Tuesday. That toll excludes two policemen newspapers said were hanged in Al-Baida last Friday. Oea, another newspaper close to Seif al-Islam, said the two policemen had been strung up by demonstrators.
Security forces circled Al-Baida last Friday, a source close to the authorities told AFP, following internet reports that protesters had seized control of the city.
Another well-informed local source told AFP that 14 civilians, including protesters and members of the Revolutionary Committees, the backbone of Gaddafi’s regime, had been killed in Al-Baida.