Explosions, gunfire rock Tripoli as rebels advance

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TRIPOLI: Explosions and gunfire rocked Tripoli overnight, after days of battlefield defeats left Muammar Gaddafi's government and troops penned ever more tightly in the besieged capital by a rebel advance.

Rebels said the fighting marked a final push in an uprising against the long-time leader that has raged in the North African oil-producing nation for six months, while Gaddafi dismissed it as an ill-fated attempt by "rats".

"Those rats ... were attacked by the masses tonight and we eliminated them," Gaddafi said in a live audio message overstate television.

"I know that there are air bombardments but the fireworks were louder than the sound of the bombs thrown by the aircraft."

An official at the rebel National Transitional Council said the fighting was the beginning of the end for Gaddafi. "The zero hour has started. The rebels in Tripoli have risen up," Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, vice-chairman of the rebel National Transitional Council, based in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, told this news agency.

The clashes inside the city triggered celebrations among Gaddafi opponents elsewhere in the country and in the capital of neighbouring Tunisia, and fed widespread speculation Gaddafi's 41-year rule was sliding towards collapse.

Gaddafi's information minister said the rebel incursion into Tripoli had been quickly put down, though sounds of gunfire and explosions continued into the early morning.

Fighting was still raging after midnight around Mitiga airbase in Tripoli's Tajourah district, an area said to be under rebel control, an opposition activist told outside Libya.

The gun battles had left a number of rebels dead in the suburb of Qadah and elsewhere, along with at least three pro-Gaddafi soldiers in the Zawiyat al-Dahmania district of Tripoli, he said. (Reuters)