TURKISH PRIME Minister Tayyip Erdogan said last night his country had offered a “guarantee” to Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy if he left Libya, but said Ankara had received no answer.
“Gadafy has no way out but to leave Libya, through the guarantees given to him, it seems,” Mr Erdogan said in an interview.
“We ourselves have offered him this guarantee, via the representatives we’ve sent. We told him we would help him to be sent wherever he wanted to be sent. We would discuss the issue with our allies, according to the response we receive. Unfortunately we still haven’t got a response from Gadafy.” Mr Erdogan did not specify what kind of guarantee his country had offered to Gadafy.
Meanwhile, rebel forces in the besieged city of Misurata suffered their heaviest casualties since taking control of the city in mid-April yesterday, with pro-Gadafy forces launching a heavy bombardment hours after Nato Apache helicopter strikes in the area.
Rockets and mortars rained down on the battered front-line village of Dafniya all day, as Gadafy’s infantry, backed by four tanks, attacked rebel fortifications.
The rebels said they beat off the assault and chased after Gadafy forces, destroying two of the four tanks. But the toll was heavy: at Misurata’s Hikma hospital a stream of ambulances and private cars tore into the forecourt, unloading the wounded and the dead.
By late afternoon Hikma reported 22 dead and 120 wounded, with wards and tented enclosures outside jammed with the injured.
One fighter, Mohammed Khalid, who brought four wounded friends to the hospital from the front, said he had seen two tanks stopped and on fire from rebel attacks. “We saw some trucks and opened fire. The soldiers ran behind some houses,” he said.
Outside the hospital tents, relatives of fighters at the front line clustered around each ambulance to see if it contained a loved one.
“The front line is like hell,” said a 20-year-old medic Feras Mohammed. “Grads [rockets] are falling everywhere.” This was his third trip from the front line in the back of an ambulance attending to wounded fighters.
The attacks came hours after Nato Apaches hit tanks and other targets close to the besieged town in 14 separate attacks during the night. Yet there was no sign of Nato jets or helicopters during the bombardment and assault that followed, prompting questions about whether the alliance has the capacity to react to Gadafy attacks. – (Additional reporting Reuters)