Rome's Jewish community, some of whom were forced to leave Libya 40 years ago, are angry over Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's apparent willingness to meet them only on Saturday, the Sabbath day sacred to Jews.

Community leaders also want Mr Gaddafi, who arrives in Rome today for his first visit to Italy, to tell them the whereabouts of a Palestinian who was sentenced for a 1982 attack on a Rome synagogue and found asylum in Libya.

"At the very least this shows a lack of sensitivity," Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, told Reuters. "But it is also a matter of principle. We won't go as a community unless the day is changed".

Libyan organisers of the trip have invited the Jews to attend a meeting - along with Italians who were expelled from the country in the early 1970s - planned for Saturday in a tent being set up for Gaddafi in a sprawling Rome park.

The Sabbath, or Shabbat, is a day of rest during which Jews cannot work. Many of Rome's Jews are observant, including Shalom Tshuva, a Libyan who is a deputy president of Rome's Jewish community and head of Libyan Jews in Italy.

The Jewish community in the former Italian colony, which traces its origins to Roman times, numbered about 38,000 at the end of World War II. But it declined steadily after anti-Jewish pogroms in 1945 and 1948.