Final showdown in Libya

WISHTATA, Libya: Libyan fighters clashed Friday with Muammar Qaddafi’s supporters inside Bani Walid, one of the last towns holding out against the country’s new rulers, the former rebels said.
Abdullah Kenshil, the former rebels’ chief negotiator, said they were fighting gunmen positioned in houses in the town and the hills that overlooked it.
Anti-Qaddafi forces were moving in from the east and south, and the fighters deepest inside Bani Walid were clashing with Qaddafi’s men about 2 km from the center of the town, Kenshil said. “They are inside the city. They are fighting with snipers.”
The National Transitional Council (NTC) had set a Saturday deadline for the town to surrender or face an offensive. Kenshil said the Friday evening attack was provoked by Qaddafi’s forces firing rockets from inside Bani Walid at NTC positions around the town. “They forced this on us and it was in self-defense,” he said.
He said three Qaddafi loyalists had been wounded and three killed, while the former rebels had one dead and four wounded. He said the NTC had taken seven prisoners.
Kenshil said the NTC believed there were about 600 Qaddafi supporters in and around Bani Walid.
“Snipers are scattered over the hills and we want to chase them,” he said. “There is hand-to-hand combat. The population is afraid so we have to go and protect civilians.”
A fighter who appeared dressed for a weekend outing in jeans, a blue button-down shirt and sunglasses came out of the city, looking despondent. “I lost a friend inside,” he told reporters, choking on tears.
Bani Walid is one of Qaddafi’s last bastions along with his hometown Sirte on the coast and southern desert town of Sabha. In Teassain, 90 km east of Sirte, witnesses saw heavy rocket exchanges between NTC forces and Qaddafi loyalists.
Interpol said it had issued its most-wanted alert for the arrest of Qaddafi, his son Seif Al-Islam and the country’s ex-chief of military intelligence. The three are sought by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity, and there have been reports Seif Al-Islam is in Bani Walid.
Qaddafi has not been seen in public for months and went underground after anti-regime fighters swept into Tripoli on Aug. 21. Western diplomatic sources believe he is still in Libya.
But four of his top officials, including his air force commander and a general in charge of his forces in the south, were among a new group of Libyans who have fled to neighboring Niger, officials in Niger said.
Gen. Ali Kana, the southern commander, and Ali Sharif Al-Rifi, the air force chief, were among 14 Libyans who arrived in the northern Niger town of Agadez on Thursday after crossing the border in a convoy of four-wheel drive vehicles, they said.
Niger, under pressure from Western powers and Libya’s new rulers to hand over former Qaddafi officials suspected of human rights abuses, said it would respect its commitments to the ICC if Qaddafi or his sons entered the country.
“We are signatories to the (ICC’s) Rome Statute so they know what they are exposed to if they come,” Massaoudou Hassoumi, the head of President Mahamadou Issoufou’s Cabinet, said.
He said the latest arrivals were “under control” in Agadez, through which the head of Qaddafi’s security brigades, Mansour Dhao, passed earlier this week en route to the capital Niamey. “We are taking them in on humanitarian grounds. No one has told us that these are wanted people,” said Hassoumi. (By AGENCIES)