Libya: Gaddafi regime claims 100 civilians have been killed by coalition air strikes
The Libyan government on Thursday night claimed close to 100 civilians had died in air strikes since last Saturday, the first estimate of the number of casualties since the first day of bombing.
7:05PM GMT 24 Mar 2011
State media in the country have repeatedly stressed the civilian casualties of
the air strikes, which they say include many children.
But officials have been unable to give definitive figures, and have provided
no firm evidence of the breakdown of civilian and military casualties.
In a reversal of practices in similar situations where governments have been
keen to show off civilian losses, police and militia on Thursday detained
seven journalists for an hour at a checkpoint near Tajoura Hospital in the
east of the city, where casualties were to be undergoing treatment.
They were eventually escorted back to their hotel after being refused access.
A mass funeral was held at the nearby Martyrs' Cemetery for 18 people said to
have been killed in raids on Wednesday night. A government official claimed
they were civilian, though Mussa Ibrahim, the official spokesman, admitted
that students at military academies were counted as civilians.
A military academy in Tajoura, as well as a nearby military base containing
anti-aircraft and radar equipment, was among the sites hit on Wednesday
night.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, a Reuters photographer was taken to
Tajoura Hospital and shown 18 burned corpses. All were of young men. It was
not confirmed whether they were same men buried yesterday.
"Civilian deaths are getting close to 100 for sure," Dr Ibrahim
said, though he added the Ministry of Health had yet to release exact
figures.
The army has released no figures at all for military casualties. The
government gave a figure on Sunday of 64 deaths in total across the country
for the first night of raids, but has not updated that number since.
Dr Ibrahim also said the civilian death toll included workers at airports,
which had also been attacked.
A large crowd gathered for the mass funeral, which was broadcast live on state
television under the banner headline: "Funeral of our martyrs, victims
of the crusader colonial aggression".
They listened to an angry address which told them that western forces were
responsible for "hundreds of innocent Libyans
being killed".
Altogether 33 coffins were brought, though some were taken away again
afterwards to be buried elsewhere. The shrouded bodies were removed and
placed in breeze block-lined graves left empty when soldiers due to be
buried in them on Sunday never arrived.
Reporters were unable to find any relatives of the dead to confirm identities.
General Carter Ham, head of US Africa Command, did not go as far as previous
allied comments that there was no evidence of any civilian casualties at all.
"I cannot be sure there have been no civilian casualties," he said
at a briefing at the Sigonella airbase in Sicily. "We are being very,
very precise and discriminating in our targeting.
"There have been more instances than I can think of in the conduct of
this campaign where our pilots have made the correct decision to not attack
a legitimate military target for concern of the civilian casualties."
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