Libyan protesters attack state TV station as Gaddafi’s son warns

TRIPOLI, Monday

Angry Libyan protesters sacked the state broadcaster and set government buildings ablaze today as the son of leader Muammar Gaddafi warned the country faces civil war and “rivers of blood”.

With gunfire crackling in the streets of Tripoli, and Human Rights Watch putting the death toll at 233 since Thursday, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi vaguely promised reforms as he condemned the revolt as a foreign plot.

The elder and famously mercurial Gaddafi, 68, the longest-serving leader in the Arab world, remained out of sight.

“Libya is at a crossroads. If we do not agree today on reforms... rivers of blood will run through Libya,” he said in a fiery but rambling televised speech that betrayed a note of desperation within his father’s 41-year regime.

“We will take up arms... we will fight to the last bullet. We will destroy seditious elements. If everybody is armed, it is civil war, we will kill each other... Libya is not Egypt, it is not Tunisia.”

Within hours of the statement, protesters in the capital Tripoli sacked state broadcast offices and set branches of the People’s Committees that are the mainstay of the regime ablaze overnight, witnesses told AFP today.

“The headquarters of Al-Jamahiriya Two television and Al-Shababia radio have been sacked,” one witness said by telephone on condition of anonymity.
Broadcasts on both channels were interrupted on Sunday evening but resumed on Monday morning.

A number of witnesses said protesters had torched public buildings in the capital overnight, including the interior ministry, People’s Committee offices and also police stations.

“Protesters burned and ransacked the ministry of interior building,” in central Tripoli, one witness told AFP by email. Earlier, heavy gunfire erupted in central Tripoli and several city areas for the first time since the uprising began in eastern Libya, witnesses and an AFP journalist reported.

“We can hear gunfire outside. It hasn’t stopped all day,” the resident of a suburb east of Tripoli told AFP in Cairo by telephone.

“When we heard the unrest was approaching, we stocked up on flour and tomatoes. It’s definitely the end of the regime. This has never happened in Libya before. We are praying that it ends quickly.”

“Our neighbour was killed last night,” added another Tripoli resident in the centre of the capital.

Some 500 Libyans meanwhile stormed and looted a South Korean construction site near the capital on Monday, injuring about 15 Bangladeshi as well as three South Korean workers, Seoul’s foreign ministry said.

Earlier, witnesses reported clashes in Tripoli’s downtown Green Square between protesters and Kadhafi supporters, and a resident of the working-class Gurgi area said security forces had fired tear gas at protesters.

In Cairo, Libya’s envoy to the Arab League said he had resigned to “join the revolution.”

Tripoli’s ambassador to Delhi also quit, as did a lower-level diplomat in Beijing who said Kadhafi may have left the country, Al-Jazeera television reported. (AFP)