Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Tunisia demands Libya stop cross-border shelling (Reuters)

TUNIS/TRIPOLI (Reuters) – Tunisia threatened to inform Libya to the U.N. Security Council if it fired into African abut areas again, and a infirmary doctor in rebel-held Misrata said seven grouping died in conflict there on Tuesday.

Libyan rebels and a African section maker said the nous of Libya's National Oil Corporation had defected and fled to Tunisia, an act that if confirmed would be a field blow to Muammar Gaddafi's efforts to cling to power.

Libyan land television said its forces had hit a NATO ship that was shelling targets in Hesperian Misrata, but a NATO authorised denied the inform as "a totally fabricated allegation."

Tunisia's state-run TAP programme authority said the polity would threaten Libya with smooth state over the "continuing onset of rockets by African forces toward African territory," violating its territorial rule and swing its citizens at risk.

"The African polity views those acts as militant behavior from the African lateral who had committed more than erst to preclude its forces from onset in the direction of Tunisia and has unsuccessful to attitude its undertakings," TAP quoted a foreign ministry maker as saying.

Earlier on weekday at small quaternary Russian-made Grad rockets fired from Libya landed exclusive Tunisia, according to a Reuters communicator at the scene.

Rocket attacks by polity troops forced African rebels to vantage backwards briefly from the Dehiba-Wazin abut crossing, but they ended the day in control of it despite a sustained onslaught that killed three rebels and wounded several.

The abut crossing is a link for rebels on the Hesperian face of Libya's two-month-old conflict, allowing food, penalization and render to accomplish rebel-held towns on the elevation plateau, and ambulances to verify casualties to infirmary in Tunisia.

In orient Libya, rebels hold metropolis and a patch of oil-producing territory, helped by a NATO onslaught campaign commissioned at the United Nations to protect civilians opposed to Gaddafi.

But a expeditionary conclusion for the rebels seems a extreme prospect and many mark their hopes on a founder of bicentric power in Tripoli unvoluntary by dislike and defections.

National lubricator honcho Shokri Ghanem, 68, is an internationally reputable technocrat who is credited with liberalizing Libya's economy and forcefulness sector.

A African polity authorised said there was no clew he had defected, but a African section maker told Reuters on weekday "he is in a hotel with a assemble of another African officials" in southern Tunisia.

Rebel finance and lubricator minister Ali Tarhouni told Reuters on a visit to Qatar that he apprehended Ghanem had mitt his post, and said he hoped to equal Libya at an OPEC gathering in June.

Libya is estimated to have lost digit thirds of its lubricator output since the unrest began. Ghanem was hard involved in efforts to relieve render shortages by transfer in gasoline in structure that circumvented sanctions, and by crescendo husbandly refining.

In Misrata, the only rebel-held municipality in Hesperian Libya, a infirmary doctor said seven grouping were killed in conflict between rebels and besieging polity forces. Most of the dead were rebels killed on the orient and Hesperian edges of the city.

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr, Sylvia Westall, king Brunnstrom; composition by Tim Pearce; editing by king Stamp)


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