Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has threatened retaliation against Europe unless NATO ceases its operations, saying loyalist forces can launch stinging attacks like ‘locusts and bees’.
The embattled leader also urged supporters to retrieve weapons that France supplied to rebels battling his regime, in a speech broadcast by loudspeakers to crowds in Tripoli's Green Square.
‘The Libyan people are capable, one day, of taking the battle to Europe and the Mediterranean’ region, Gaddafi said in the message, as thousands of supporters massed in the landmark square in the centre of the capital.
‘They could attack your homes, your offices, your families (who) could become legitimate military targets because you have transformed our offices, headquarters, homes and children into military targets which you say are legitimate,’ Gaddafi said.
‘If we decide to do so, we are capable of throwing ourselves on Europe like swarms of locusts or bees.
‘So we advise you to back-track before you face a catastrophe,’ he warned in a speech to mark 100 days of the NATO military campaign against the North African country.
Gaddafi was speaking from a secret location, but his voice boomed across the square, where the authorities were hoping to gather one million regime supporters.
The crowds, waving green flights and carrying portraits of Gaddafi, chanted slogans of allegiance to ‘God, Gaddafi and Libya,’ while some fired guns into the air in celebration as the night sky was lit by fireworks.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said yesterday that this week's arms drop was meant only to defend peaceful civilians from Gaddafi's forces and thus fell in line with existing UN resolutions on the conflict.
‘Civilians had been attacked by Gaddafi's forces and were in an extremely vulnerable situation and that is why medicine, food and also weapons of self-defence were parachuted,’ Mr Juppe said.
‘It is not a violation of the UN Security Council resolutions’ under which France and other allies launched air strikes and imposed embargoes to protect civilians from Gaddafi, he added.
Meanwhile, an African Union summit said African nations will not execute an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Gaddafi, saying it ‘seriously complicates’ efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.
The ICC on 27 June issued warrants for Gaddafi, his son Seif al-Islam, and the head of Libyan intelligence, Abdullah al-Senussi, for atrocities committed in the bloody uprising.
