TRIPOLI ? NATO said Sunday that it was looking into charges by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that an alliance airstrike in early hours of the day had destroyed a civilian home here in the Libyan capital, killing at least three adults and two small children.
If confirmed, the bombing would be NATO?s second mistaken air strike in recent days. On Saturday, the alliance admitted that it had inadvertently hit a rebel convoy of tanks and military vehicles moving around the front near the eastern oil port of Brega.
NATO officials are talking openly of strains on the three-month-old Libyan operation, and the mistaken strikes could bolster Congressional criticisms of the American role in the mission.. NATO has said repeatedly that it using precision strikes on military targets to avoid killing civilians, while the Qaddafi government has said the strikes have killed hundreds. There have been thousands of NATO sorties over three months, and the Qaddafi government has frequently taken foreign reporters on tours of the damaged areas to offer unverifiable accounts of civilian deaths; Sunday morning?s provided the first credible evidence of direct civilian casualties from NATO air strikes.
Foreign journalists lodged at the Rixos Hotel in the capital heard a large blast rattle windows just after 1 a.m.. A few moments later, an agitated Qaddafi spokesman began summoning them urgently for a bus ride to the bombing site, saying that the bodies of civilians were still in the rubble.
A corpse was sitting in an open ambulance near the site as the journalists arrived. Emergency workers and neighborhood men pulled away wreckage from a large cinder block home, and another body was carried out. The reporters were then taken to Tripoli Central Hospital and shown the bodies of a third adult and a baby, laid alongside the first two. A small child arrived on a stretcher, dead either on arrival or soon after. All the bodies appeared caked in dust from the ruble.
Perhaps wary of recent attacks by small groups of rebels against Qaddafi forces here, one of the Qaddafi government minders brought his Kalashnikov along to the hospital.
A Qaddafi spokesman said the destroyed home housed 15 members of an extended family named al-Ghrari. of Tripoli.
The home sat in a working class neighborhood called Arada, in the Souq al-Juma area, which is known as a hotbed of opposition to the Qaddafi government. As the journalists visited in early Sunday, and during another call later, a few neighbors tried without evidence to argue that the Qaddafi government had set off the blast or planted the dead bodies. But others who said that they loathed Colonel Qaddafi confirmed an airstrike.
There were no indications of any military facility in the area. Children?s shoes, a woman?s dress, a ladle and other kitchen materials lay amid the wreckage early Sunday. Several carports on the block had collapsed in the blast, crushing the vehicles within. A neighbor a block away invited reporters into his home to show shattered glass from windows and doors, and said his wife had been taken to the hospital with wounds from the shards.
?Why did they bomb a civilian house?? asked Abdul Rouf, 26, another neighbor, who said he had run to his roof when he heard jets overhead and watched a missile hit the house.
Khalid Kaim, a deputy foreign minister, arrived at the scene not long after the blast and told journalists it gave the lie to NATO?s stated mission of protecting civilians from Colonel Qaddafi?s wrath for challenging his rule. ?We have seen who is attacking civilians,? he said. ?They are targeting houses and flats. Tomorrow they will target schools and hospitals.?
Both NATO and the Qaddafi government have recently stepped up their efforts to accuse each other of recklessly endangering civilians. In a news conference on Saturday in Brussels, NATO officials showed a film clip that appeared to show Qaddafi forces firing missiles from inside a mosque into a residential area during fighting in a town in the Nafusa mountains, in Libya?s far west.
Chat about this story w/ TalkitaSource: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f471b67dbdb3136e8f27d69865b129c0
world news daily mail world news daily net world news daily obama world news daily obama birth certificate world news daily podcast
No comments:
Post a Comment