Desperate residents fled Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown Sirte yesterday as fighters of Libya’s interim government held off a final assault on one his two remaining bastions to allow civilians to escape.
Libya’s National Transitional Council is to hold fresh talks today on forming an interim government after a previous round failed last weekend, NTC officials said.
A much trailed meeting last Sunday that had been expected to unveil an interim cabinet broke up without a deal.
A commander of NTC fighters near Sirte said pro-Gaddafi forces were targeting residents even as they fled, with a fighter killed and a packed family car destroyed when their convoy was hit.
Nato said it was nearing the “final phase” of its air war in Libya, a day after warplanes struck just one target in an intense bombing campaign that has lasted six months.
And a commander of the new regime said a captured general loyal to Col Gaddafi had said the fugitive Libyan leader was secretly moving around in the southern desert.One month to the day since Col Gaddafi’s compound fell to rebels in Tripoli, the campaign to take Sirte and the ex-Libyan leader’s other principal remaining bastion of Bani Walid was on hold for another day.
Asked why NTC fighters were delaying a final assault on Sirte, commander Osama Muttawa Swehly said: “We’re trying to get the families out.
“We are averaging between 400 to 500 cars a day. We are basically trying to starve (the Gaddafi forces) out.”
While the country’s new authorities do not know where the strongman is, they are focused on taking the coastal city of Sirte and the desert redoubt of Bani Walid, two places where some think he might be.But reports also emerged that he may be in the south.
In recent days, new regime forces have also claimed full control over all three main towns of the Al-Jufra oasis, north of Sabha, leaving Kadhafi loyalists in Sirte and Bani Walid effectively cut off from any line of escape to the south.While another full-scale assault on Bani Walid was on hold yesterday, an AFP correspondent with NTC fighters a few kilometres outside the town said clashes had erupted there early in the day.
In other developments, the UN atomic agency confirmed the existence of raw uranium in Libya after US news channel CNN reported that new regime forces had found potentially radioactive material.
International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Gill Tudor said the uranium, stored by the Gaddafi regime, had been declared to the IAEA and that the agency hoped to examine the material “once the situation in the country stabilises.”
French oil giant Total announced it would restart production from an offshore oil platform off Libya within days, making it the first major to return to work since the fall of Kadhafi.
“We are going to restart production on Al-Jurf this weekend,” a spokesman said, referring to a field Total operates in a joint venture with the Libyan state oil company and the German firm Wintershall.