Protesters and security forces clashed in Libya’s second city while mourners buried those killed overnight.
|||Tripoli - Libyan security forces opened fire on protesters in the country's second city Benghazi on Sunday, a witness said, after scores died in one of the bloodiest days of protests sweeping the Arab world.
Residents said tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of protesters had taken to the streets of the city to bury scores of dead killed in the last 24 hours.
Protesters, inspired by uprisings in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, are demanding an end to the 41-year rule of strongman Muammar Gaddafi. His security forces have responded with a violent crackdown. Communications are tightly controlled, and Benghazi is not accessible to international journalists.
Human Rights Watch said 84 people were killed in the city on Saturday, bringing the death toll in four days of clashes mainly in the east of the country to 173.
“A massacre took place here last night,” one resident, who did not want to be named, told Reuters by telephone on Sunday.
Later on Sunday a leading tribal figure who requested anonymity said security forces, mainly confined to a compound, had been venturing out of their barracks and shooting protesters in the street in “cat and mouse chases”.
Clashes were taking place on a road leading to a cemetery where thousands had gone to bury the dead.
“The situation is very tense and scattered fires have erupted in revolutionary committee headquarters and other buildings,” he said.
Piecemeal accounts suggest the streets of Benghazi, about 1 000km east of the capital Tripoli, are now largely controlled by anti-government protesters, under periodic attack from security forces who fire from their high-walled compound.
A resident said 100 000 protesters had headed for the cemetery “to bury dozens of martyrs”.
Another witness told Reuters thousands of people had performed ritual prayers in front of 60 bodies laid out in the city. Women and children were among a crowd of hundreds of thousands that had come out onto the Mediterranean seafront and the area surrounding the port, he said.
“The protesters are here until the regime falls,” he said.
A Benghazi hospital doctor said victims suffered severe wounds from high-velocity rifles.
A senior Libyan security source said a group believed to be criminals had launched an attack on the Benghazi municipal building, blew it up, seized rifles and fired randomly in order to create an opportunity to escape.
The Libyan government has not released any casualty figures. A text message sent to mobile phone subscribers on Sunday said protesters in the east were trying to break the region away from central rule.
“The deaths in Benghazi and Al Bayda (a nearby town), on both sides, were the result of attacks on weapons stores to use in terrorising people and killing innocents,” it said. “All Libyan sons, we have to all stand up to stop the cycle of separation and sedition and destruction of our beloved Libya.”
The government has disrupted the Internet, used by protesters to organise themselves.
Al Jazeera, the Arabic television station whose coverage has played a big role in protests throughout the Middle East and North Africa, said its satellite transmissions across the region had been jammed. The Lebanese telecoms minister said the jamming appeared to come from Libya. - Reuters
Source: http://www.iol.co.za/libyan-troops-open-fire-in-benghazi-1.1029341
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