Tripoli said on Thursday it would send a representative to the next OPEC meeting, replacing the senior oil official who defected, saying he had lost faith in the rule of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
Former National Oil Corp chairman Shokri Ghanem, who oversaw Libya’s oil and gas sector, is the second-most senior official to quit and rebels said the defection showed that the end was nearing for Qaddafi almost four months into a rebellion against him.
However, an official in Tripoli played down the significance of Ghanem’s departure.
Photo: Reuters
“This is a country, a state, a government, not just one person,” government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said.
He said the government would be represented at the meeting of the OPEC in Vienna on Wednesday.
“I don’t have a name yet but we’ll have somebody,” he said.
Ghanem appeared on Wednesday at a news conference in Rome after leaving Libya more than a week ago.
“I have been working in Libya for so many years believing that we can make a lot of reform from within. Unfortunately this became not possible, especially now, when we see the spilling of blood every day in Libya,” Ghanem said.
NATO STRIKES
A series of at least 10 NATO strikes hit in and around the Libyan capital early yesterday, targeting military barracks close to Qaddafi’s sprawling compound in central Tripoli, a police station and a military base, a government official said. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.
The strikes appeared to be the heaviest in Tripoli since South African President Jacob Zuma visited Qaddafi in the capital earlier this week in an apparently unsuccessful effort to find a peaceful resolution to the country’s crisis.
Four of the early morning blasts yesterday shook central Tripoli, targeting an area where military barracks are located, said a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government policy. Those barracks, which had been hit in the past, are close to Qaddafi’s sprawling compound.
Six earlier strikes targeted a police station and a military base outside the capital in the areas of Hera and Aziziya, the official said.
‘GANG-RAPED’
A UN official said the world body’s refugee agency would meet later in the day with a Libyan woman who claimed she was gang-raped by Qaddafi’s troops.
Imad al-Obeidi was deported on Thursday from Qatar, where she had sought refuge and was flown against her will to Benghazi, the official, Adrian Edwards, said in Geneva. Benghazi is the Libyan rebels’ de facto capital.
Edwards said his agency was with el-Obeidi when she was taken from her Qatar hotel against her will. He said she is a recognized refugee and her deportation violated international law.
US Department of State spokesman Mark Toner said Washington was “monitoring the situation” and working to ensure al-Obeidi’s safety.
In March, el-Obeidi rushed into Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel where all foreign correspondents are forced to stay while covering the part of Libya under Qaddafi’s control, and shouted out her story of being stopped at a checkpoint, dragged away and gang-raped by soldiers. As she spoke emotionally and as photographers and reporters recorded her words, government minders, whose job is to escort reporters around the area, jumped her and dragged her away.
She disappeared for several days, then turned up in Tunisia and later Qatar. Little was heard from her until on Thursday, when she was suddenly expelled from Qatar and ended up in Benghazi.
No explanation was forthcoming from Qatar.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema