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Kadhafi loyalists threaten to snuff out protests

19 February 2011 03:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Moamer Kadhafi’s regime vowed on Friday to snuff attempts to challenge the Libyan leader, after an opposition "day of anger" turned into a bloodbath that local sources said cost at least 28 lives, APA reports quoting AFP.
"The response of the people and the Revolutionary Forces to any adventure by these small groups will be sharp and violent," the Revolutionary Committees said on the website of their newspaper, Azzahf Al-Akhdar (Green March).
The committees are the backbone of Kadhafi’s regime.
"The power of the people, the Jamahiriya (government by the masses), the Revolution and the leader are all red lines, and anyone who tries to cross or approach them will be committing suicide and playing with fire."
The tough line came after security forces on Thursday shot dead at least eight people in Benghazi and 16 in Al-Baida, according to a detailed account from Human Rights Watch (HRW) that quoted unidentified witnesses.
Several thousand mourners on Friday went straight from weekly prayers to funerals for the Benghazi dead, witnesses told AFP, with one witness saying that 13 victims were buried in the city’s Hawari cemetery.
"The security forces’ vicious attacks on peaceful demonstrators lay bare the reality of Moamer Kadhafi’s brutality when faced with any internal dissent," said HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director, Sarah Leah Whitson.
A medical source in Benghazi, speaking to AFP on Friday, put the death toll there at 14 -- a figure confirmed by Ramadan Briki, the locally based chief editor of Quryna, a national newspaper.
In Al-Baida, a well-informed Libyan source told AFP that 14 civilians have been killed since Wednesday, including both protesters and members of the Revolutionary Committees killed in their offices.
The source could not say how many members of the security forces had been killed.
In another sign of growing disorder in Libya, about 1,000 inmates broke out of a prison in Benghazi, Quryna reported on its website, and three convicts were killed by security forces when they tried to flee another prison outside Tripoli, a source in the security services said.
The toll of 28 dead does not include the three prisoners.
Iraq, meanwhile, denied that an Arab League summit set for March 29 in Baghdad, the first since popular unrest in the Middle East flared last month, had been postponed, as the Libyan presidency of the pan-Arab group had said.
Kadhafi, 68, is the longest-serving leader in the Arab world, but his oil-producing North African nation is bookended by Tunisia and Egypt, whose long-time leaders have been toppled in the face of popular uprisings.
Opponents of his regime used Facebook to call for a national "day of anger" for Thursday, but Kadhafi sought to counter its impact with his own pro-regime rally in the heart of the capital Tripoli.
Hundreds joined the rally in Green Square, near the waterfront, hoisting banners proclaiming "Kadhafi, father of the people" and "the crowd supports the revolution and its leader."
Kadhafi himself turned up briefly in the early hours of Friday, getting a rapturous welcome, according to images on state television which also showed what it called similar rallies in Benghazi, Sirte and other cities.
Britain, France and the European Union have called for restraint by the authorities in Libya, whose relations with the West have improved sharply over the past decade after years of virtual pariah status.
In Paris, the French government said on Friday it had suspended authorisation of exports of security equipment to both Libya and the Gulf state of Bahrain over the killing of anti-government protesters.