Tripoli : Zero hour has started, as rebels claimed, explosions and gunfire rocked Tripoli through the night as opponents of Muammar Qadhafi rose up in the capital, declaring a final push to topple the Libyan leader after a six-month war reached the city’s outskirts.
A defiant Qadhafi said an assault by “rats” had been repelled. “Those rats … were attacked by the masses tonight and we eliminated them,” Qadhafi said in an audio message broadcast over state television early on Sunday.
“I know that there are air bombardments but the fireworks were louder than the sound of the bombs thrown by the aircraft.”
Intense gunfire erupted after nightfall. Reuters journalists in the centre of the capital said it subsided somewhat after several hours, but bursts of machinegun fire and explosions could still be heard in the pre-dawn hours, indicating fighting in several neighbourhoods.
“The zero hour has started. The rebels in Tripoli have risen up,” Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, vice-chairman of the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC), based in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, told Reuters.
Qadhafi’s influential former number two, Abdel Salam Jalloud, who defected to the rebel cause a day earlier, appeared on Al Jazeera by Internet video link and called on the capital to rise against “the tyrant”.
“Tonight you claim victory over fear,” he said. An NTC official, Mohammed al-Allaqi, said Jalloud was in Rome.
The clashes inside the capital triggered massive street celebrations in Benghazi as well as elsewhere in the country and in the capital of neighbouring Tunisia
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