Gaddafi

Cairo, Feb. 20 (AP): Libyan forces fired machine-guns at mourners marching in a funeral for anti-government protesters in the eastern city of Benghazi today, a day after commandos and foreign mercenaries loyal to longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi pummeled demonstrators with assault rifles and other heavy weaponry.

A doctor at one Benghazi hospital said 15 people died in today’s clashes. Earlier he said his morgue had received at least 200 dead from six days of unrest. The doctor said his hospital, one of the two in Libya’s second largest city, is out of supplies and cannot treat more than 70 wounded in similar attacks on mourners.

The crackdown in oil-rich Libya is shaping up as the most brutal repression of anti-government protests that began with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

Gaddafi has been trying to bring his country out of isolation, announcing in 2003 that he was abandoning his programme for weapons of mass destruction, renouncing terrorism and compensating victims of the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in Berlin and the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Those decisions opened the door for warmer relations with the West and the lifting of UN and US sanctions. But he continues to face allegations of human rights violations.

Gaddafi has his vast oil wealth and his response is less constrained by alliances with the West than Egypt and Bahrain, which are both important US allies.

In a report yesterday, the official Libyan news agency said authorities have arrested “dozens of foreign elements trained to strike at Libya’s stability and security”.

It also said authorities were not ruling out that those elements were connected to what it called an Israeli plot to destabilize countries in North Africa, including Libya, as well as Lebanon and Iran.

Residents yesterday reported getting messages on their cellphones warning them about taking any action against Gaddafi, national security and the oil industry, the “red lines” in Libya that must not be crossed.

Yemen unrest

The leader of Yemen’s secessionist Southern Movement was arrested in Aden today and shots were fired at a demonstration in Sanaa.