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Security forces fire on mourners at funeral again

Published:Monday | February 21, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Protesters demonstrate against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, shown on placard at left, in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria in Egypt yesterday. Libyan forces fired machine guns at mourners marching in a funeral for anti-government protesters in the eastern city of Benghazi yesterday, a day after commandos and foreign mercenaries loyal to longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi pummelled demonstrators with assault rifles and other heavy weaponry. The writing in Arabic on placard reads "Down, the leader of the Abu Salim massacre", referring to an incident when hundreds of inmates were killed when security forces opened fire during 1996 riots at Libya's most notorious prison. - AP

CAIRO (AP):

LIBYAN FORCES fired machine guns at thousands of mourners marching in a funeral for anti-government protesters in the eastern city of Benghazi yesterday, a day after commandos and foreign mercenaries loyal to longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi attacked demonstrators with assault rifles and other heavy weapons.

A doctor at one Benghazi hospital, where many of the casualties are being taken, said 20 people were killed yesterday. US-based Human Rights Watch said 173 people died - mostly in Benghazi - in three days of unrest from Thursday through Saturday. A Switzerland-based Libyan activist said 11 people were killed in the city of Beyida on Wednesday. The latest numbers brought the toll to at least 204 since Wednesday, although a precise count has been difficult because of Libya's tight restrictions on reporting.

The crackdown in oil-rich Libya is shaping up to be the most brutal repression of anti-government protests that began with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The protests spread quickly around the region to Bahrain in the Gulf, impoverished Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, the North African neighbours of Tunisia - Libya, Algeria, Morocco - and outside the Middle East to places including the East African nation of Djibouti, and even China.

Gadhafi 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 Gadhafi continues to face allegations of human-rights violations in his North African nation. Gadhafi has his own vast oil wealth and his response is less constrained by close alliances with the West than Egypt and Bahrain, which are both important US allies.

Because of the media blackout, information about the uprising has come through telephone interviews, along with videos and messages posted online, and through opposition activists in exile. The blackout has made it difficult to confirm the tolls of dead and wounded.