Hours after loud blasts shook Tripoli, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi vowed to defeat NATO as his forces launched a deadly rocket assault on rebel-held Misrata.
State television on Friday aired Qaddafi’s comments in what it said was a live telephone call from the leader, who has gone underground since Western nations began waging an air war in March to protect civilians from a bloody crackdown.
“NATO is bound to be defeated,” Qaddafi said in the speech broadcast on loudspeakers in Tripoli’s Green Square, as thousands of flag-waving regime supporters staged their biggest rally in weeks.
Photo: AFP
“We are determined to change nothing in our country other than by our own free will ... We are resisting, we are fighting,” he said.
The speech came hours after loud explosions shook the capital, where the Qaddafi has his residence, as NATO warplanes constantly overflew the Libyan capital. At least five further explosions were heard early yesterday in and around the capital, a journalist reported.
In the western rebel enclave of Misrata, 10 people were killed and 40 wounded when Qaddafi loyalists fired a volley of Grad rockets at the lifeline port city, rebel spokesman Ahmed Hassan said.
All the victims were civilians, he said, and were hit when rockets slammed into the western and eastern gates of the city. One woman was killed when a rocket struck her home, he said.
Hassan said that Qaddafi forces are bombing Misrata nearly every day and that there were no air strikes by the NATO-led coalition on the loyalist forces on Friday.
Elsewhere, a road linking the towns of Zintan and Yafran was under the complete control of the insurgents and dotted with destroyed tanks and abandoned government vehicles, a correspondent said.
The road, a key sector of the route to the border with Tunisia, was seized two days after the rebels overran the nearby villages of Ghanymma, Lawania and Zawit Bagoul.
Libyan Prime Minister Baghdadi al-Mahmudi said the Qaddafi regime was in contact with rebels for negotiations — something the insurgents have repeatedly denied.
“Our doors are open to all and we are in contact with all the parties,” Mahmudi told reporters. “We are sure meetings have taken place” in Egypt, France, Norway and Tunisia, and we “can name the persons,” who attended from the rebels’ side.
“Ask the Egyptians, French, Norwegians and Tunisians for information. They will tell you the truth,” he said. “We are sure of our meetings and everything has been recorded.”
Mahmud Jibril of the opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) earlier denied suggestions by a Russian envoy that the rebel leadership had been negotiating with the Qaddafi regime.
“I can assure you there is and there was no negotiation between the NTC and the regime,” said Jibril, who is in the Italian city of Naples where NATO’s Libya operation is headquartered.
At a joint news conference with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, Jibril said that if there were talks, the NTC would “announce it out of commitment to our friends all over the world.”
An NTC official in the opposition stronghold Benghazi in eastern Libya was even more blunt.
“Qaddafi must go. Anyone from the rebel side who negotiates his staying in power would immediately have an NTC arrest warrant issued against him,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
Russian envoy Mikhail Margelov said that Qaddafi representatives had made contact with the rebels in European capitals including Berlin, Paris and Oslo.
France said it had no knowledge of the negotiations.
NATO on Friday slammed as “cynical” an offer in an Italian newspaper interview by Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, that the regime in Tripoli was ready to organize internationally supervised elections.
“Once again, it is an instance of what I would call a cynical PR ploy,” NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said during a news briefing on the military campaign.
“It is hard to imagine that after 41 years in which Qaddafi abolished elections, the Constitution, political parties, trade unions ... [that] overnight a dictator would turn into a democrat.”
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