Bloodbath continuesin Libya: 300 massacred for defying Gaddafi.

Mtoday news

Libya, Feb 21: Protesters were gunned down in the streets, with reports that helicopter gunships and snipers were used to suppress the uprising.

The worst unrest of Gaddafi’s 41-year rule comes seven years. The bloodiest scenes were in Benghazi, where tens of thousands gathered to bury the protesters killed in clashes on Friday and Saturday and there were claims that troops were forced to retreat to their barracks, leaving demonstrators in control of the streets.

Government buildings were ransacked, a witness said, adding: ‘The city is in a state of civil mutiny.’ Officially, the national death toll was 173, but a doctor in Benghazi said she had seen 208 bodies brought into her hospital in one night.

The woman, from the Jalaa Hospital, said: ‘It’s really a massacre. You can’t count them, they’re everywhere.

 

While the deaths in Benghazi are deeply shocking, they are absolutely in line with the brutal regime that has kept Muammar Gaddafi in power for over 40 years.

This is a country where more than 1,200 prisoners at Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison are believed to have been massacred in a single month in 1996.

And where, more recently, there have been regular reports of prisoners being tortured, whipped, raped and executed without a fair trial.

Blocking social networking sites and suspending internet services, as the Libyan authorities have done over recent days, is nothing for an increasingly oppressive regime which tortures those who speak their mind freely and keeps an iron grip on the media.

But whatever the brutalities handed out by his army and secret police, Gaddafi has – until recently – always managed to remain aloof.

Voice of the young: One of the few pictures of anti-government uprisings to emerge from the repressive North African regime

Who’s next to go? A demonstrator holds a sign with the pictures of former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi

They fired tear gas and cleared the area after many fled carrying the dead and injured.

A cleric said he witnessed two people in a car being crushed by a tank, bringing the death toll to at least 84.

A resident, who did not want to be named, said: ’Dozens were killed – not 15, dozens. We are in the midst of a massacre here.’

The Libyan regime’s brutality yesterday led Foreign Secretary William Hague to describe the scenes as ’unacceptable and horrifying’.

Colonel Gaddafi is facing the biggest popular uprising of his 41-year autocratic reign, with the country’s impoverished east the focus of the dissent.

The nation has huge oil reserves but U.S. diplomats said in memos, recently revealed by WikiLeaks, that Gaddafi’s regime appears to have neglected the east of the country intentionally to weaken opponents there.

Show of solidarity: Demonstrators supporting the people of Libya protest in front of the White House in Washington, DC


A hospital official said: ’Many of the dead and the injured are relatives of doctors here.

’They are crying and I keep telling them to please stand up and help us.’

Local cleric Abellah al-Warfali said he had watched horrified as two people died attempting to flee the violence.

He said: ’I saw with my own eyes a tank crushing two people in a car.’

Earlier in the week, forces from the military’s elite Khamis Brigade moved into the cities of Benghazi, Beyida and several other urban areas.

They were accompanied by militias that seemed to include foreign mercenaries, believed to be Tunisians or sub-Saharan Africans.

 

Violently suppressing dissent: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi

Video footage that emerged yesterday from the city of al-Bayda showed scenes of bloodstained bodies in a mortuary.

The footage also showed protesters torching a municipal building and demolishing a statue of Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book.

In Darnah, east of al-Bayda, police stations are said to have been evacuated.

However, some experts claim that it is unlikely Libya will witness a nationwide revolt due to the regime’s ability to buy support and crush dissent via its security and intelligence services.

Swiss-based Libyan activist Fathi al-Warfali said that several activists had been detained in recent days.

Tripoli has remained calm during the dissent, with a government-run newspaper blaming the outburst of protest on Zionism and the ’traitors of the West’.