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All of Libya will be liberated in 72 hours-UN envoy

23 Aug 2011 18:49

Source: reuters // Reuters

* Dabbashi says Bab al-Aziziya fully held by rebels

* Gaddafi home town Sirte to fall in 48 hours, envoy says (Adds quotes, details)

By Patrick Worsnip

NEW YORK, Aug 23 (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound is fully controlled by opposition fighters and the country will be liberated within 72 hours, Libyan U.N. envoy Ibrahim Dabbashi said on Tuesday.

Gaddafi's stronghold is "totally in the hands of the revolutionaries," Dabbashi, a key figure in the Libyan opposition movement, said at Libya's U.N. mission in New York shortly after the rebels entered the compound in Tripoli.

Declaring that Gaddafi's government "has already fallen," he predicted the city of Sirte, Gaddafi's hometown, would fall within the next 48 hours and that the entire country would be under rebel control within three days.

"We expect Libya to be totally liberated and totally calm and peaceful within the next 72 hours," he told reporters, speaking two days after anti-Gaddafi fighters swept into Tripoli following a six-month uprising.

Dabbashi said Gaddafi and other top officials were probably scattered in houses across Tripoli, although they could be in an underground shelter. "We will start soon looking (for) them and we expect all of them to be captured soon," he said.

The opposition would discuss the indictments of Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and his intelligence chief with the International Criminal Court in The Hague but would like to put them on trial as war criminals in Libya, Dabbashi said.

"We prefer to have them tried in Libya because the documents which will be presented to the court and their statements inside the court is a part of Libyan history," he said.

The ICC indicted the trio for crimes against humanity and other war crimes in June. The court's chief prosecutor has made clear he would like all three handed over to the court so they can try them in the Netherlands.

Dabbashi, a veteran Libyan diplomat, was the first of Tripoli's envoys abroad to denounce Gaddafi's crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrations in February. His defection to the opposition inspired dozens of other Libyan diplomats to repudiate the government and join the rebel cause.

Asked why Saif al-Islam, whom the rebels said they had captured, appeared later before journalists apparently a free man, Dabbashi said it seemed he and his brother Mohammed hadbeen allowed to contact their security staff, who "succeeded in releasing them."

The envoy also said the rebels did not attribute great urgency to the case of Abdel-Basset al-Megrahi, a Libyan agent jailed in Scotland over the 1988 downing of PanAm Flight 103 who was freed in 2009 on health grounds and returned to Libya. Megrahi, said at that time to have three months to live, appeared last month in a televised rally alongside Gaddafi.

"This is a process which ended some time ago," Dabbashi said. "We don't think this is one of the priorities of the (future) Libyan government. ... He may die at any moment." (Editing by Peter Cooney)