At least six children were wounded when unknown assailants tossed a hand grenade into a school in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, hospital and security sources said yesterday.
Witnesses said that the blast damaged part of the building and that some of the victims were seriously wounded.
Blasts and assassinations are not uncommon in Benghazi, where security forces are battling Islamist militants tied to the Ansar al-Sharia group, which Washington has listed as a foreign terrorist organisation.
Blast damaged part of the building
The son of Libya’s special forces chief was kidnapped by gunmen in Benghazi a few days ago.
Two-and-a-half years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s army is struggling to control heavily armed former rebels, militias and militants who once fought against Gaddafi’s forces.
Militia brigades often fight turf wars for control of areas and businesses, and they have refused to disarm.
Meanwhile, officials have reported that Libya has destroyed, with the help of Western countries, the last known large stockpile of chemical weapons from the era of Muam-mar Gaddafi.
Western countries had been concerned that the weapons might fall into the hands of Islamist militants and re-gional militias.
Militia groups and armed tribesmen control parts of a vast Opec-member country awash with arms where the Tripoli government of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan has struggled to enforce its authority much beyond the capital Tripoli. Libya began dismantling its poison gas programme after signing the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2004 but the operation ground to a halt in 2011 when the Nato-backed uprising against Gaddafi broke out.
Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdelaziz told reporters that US, Canadian and German experts had helped destroy the chemical weapons stockpile in a region of south-ern Libya. “The destruction in the region of al-Rawagha was conducted with utmost precision,” he said, without giving details.
Libyan officials said there were no other known batches of chemical weapons left.
Andrew Weber, the US assistant defence secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defence programmes, said that among the Libyan chemical stocks des-troyed were 507 shells filled with mustard gas. Gaddafi’s government originally declared 25 metric tonnes of bulk mustard agent and 1,400 metric tons of precursor chemicals used to make poison gas munitions.
Gaddafi announced he would scrap his nuclear, chemical and biological arms programmes in 2003 after the US-led invasion of Iraq, which was justified as a move to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. In the end, no such WMD stockpile was found by US forces in Iraq.