Libyan state television broadcast a brief recorded audio message from the Libyan leader at mid-evening, in which he said he wanted to reassure Libyans concerned about the airstrikes on his Bab al-Aziziya compound early Thursday. At least three huge bombs struck at separate parts of the subterranean network of passageways and bunkers.
¶“I tell the coward crusaders, I live in a place where you can’t get me,” Colonel Qaddafi said. “I live in the hearts of millions.”
¶The message was broadcast as Libyan officials asserted that another NATO airstrike, on the oil city of Brega, 500 miles from Tripoli, had struck a guesthouse late Thursday or early Friday and killed 11 Muslim clerics and injured 45 other clerics and officials who were gathered in the city on what the government officials described as a peace mission.
¶Moussa Ibrahim, the chief spokesman for the Qaddafi government, said the victims were asleep when the bomb struck. He showed a video of a large group of men whom he described as members of the peace group assembled beside the harbor in Brega at sunset on Thursday, and a separate video showing what he described as the bodies of some of the bombing victims arrayed on blankets on a floor.
¶Mr. Ibrahim’s account could not be independently verified. If confirmed, it would amount to the heaviest civilian toll from a NATO airstrike since the bombing campaign began on March 19. A NATO spokeswoman in Brussels, Carmen Romero, confirmed that an attack had been conducted overnight at Brega, striking what she described as a command-and-control center for the Qaddafi forces.
¶“Our targets are solely military,” she said.
¶The propaganda value that the Qaddafi government saw in the Brega attack was underscored by its decision to hold a news conference about the air strike at one of the principal mosques in central Tripoli, with rows of Muslim and Orthodox Christian clerics seated under a canopy in the courtyard.
¶One of the Muslim clerics, Nouri Adin al-Mejrab, called on Muslims around the world to avenge the deaths of the 11 clerics with attacks that would kill 1,000 people for each of those killed in Brega. He said the attacks should take place in the countries that have joined in the NATO air campaign, including the United States, Britain, France, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
¶After other senior clerics warned that the NATO strikes were sowing hatred against the West in Libya and generating a yearning for revenge among a Muslim population that they said had previously been moderate, Mr. Mejrab issued what appeared to be a call for terrorist attacks on civilian targets in the West.
¶He described the NATO attacks as worse than those of Nazi Germany, which he said had “respected” mosques and churches. And then he added: “We will call on Muslims around the world to take revenge for all the victims of the NATO attacks. For every one of our martyrs, we will call on them to take down 1,000 people.”
¶For weeks, rabid anti-Western rhetoric has been intensifying among Libyan officials and finding a voice among the small crowds of pro-Qaddafi demonstrators who turn up wherever foreign reporters are taken by a government corps of minders and guides. While staged for television cameras, the threats seem likely to prompt heightened vigilance among Western counterterrorism officials, who are already on high alert in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
¶Libya’s secret intelligence apparatus, massively developed under Colonel Qaddafi’s 40-year rule, has shown on many occasions that it can strike back at Libya’s Western foes. The worst of these attacks came in December 1988, when a bomb planted by Libyan agents exploded aboard Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland, killing 270 people.
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