Pressure piled on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi yesterday 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 said Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem, a veteran of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, had left Libya and was in neighbouring Tunisia.
Mr Ghanem, also chairman of Libya’s national oil company, crossed the border by car on Saturday and checked in to a hotel on the southern tourist island of Djerba, the official said.
The hotel said he had left with his family early yesterday for an unknown destination.
If the defection is confirmed, Mr Ghanem would be among the most senior officials to abandon Col Gaddafi’s government since an uprising erupted in mid-February.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he held talks yesterday with Gaddafi 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 Col Gaddafi, comes as Russia is 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,” Mr Lavrov said after talks with Mr 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,” Mr Lavrov said.
“These resolutions demand that any use of military force against peaceful civilians be stopped.”
Mr Lavrov said the envoy told Moscow Tripoli was ready to cooperate if rebels and Nato stopped hostilities too. “The answer that we heard could not be called negative,” he said.
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.
The rebels, meanwhile, ruled out any three-way talks involving the regime.