Libya rebels take Brega, say raid killed civilians

Although there was no immediate confirmation of the claim Brega had fallen to the rebels, a correspondent at the scene saw seven bodies of pro-Kadhafi fighters and at least 10 burnt-out pick-up trucks along the road between Ajdabiya and Brega, 80 kilometres (50 miles) to the west.

A coalition air raid late on Friday killed 13 people, four of them civilians, some 15 kilometres east of the battleground town of Brega, a rebel civilian official told AFP.

The four civilians were an ambulance driver and three medical students from the second city of Benghazi, who were part of a rebel convoy of five or six vehicles, said Issa Khamis, liaison officer for the rebels\' transitional government in the town of Ajdabiya, east of Brega.

The strike came as rebel fighters were shooting tracer fire into the air to celebrate the entry of an advance column into Brega.

"It was a mistake (by the rebel fighters)," Khamis added. "The aircraft thought they were coming under attack and fired on the convoy."

A spokeswoman for NATO, which leads the international coalition, said the alliance was concerned about reports of civilian deaths.

"We are looking into these reports," said Oana Lungescu.

"We are always concerned by reports of civilian casualties. NATO\'s mission is to protect civilians and civilian areas from the threat of attack," she said, adding no formal investigation had been launched.

Around Brega, the bodies of soldiers loyal to leader Moamer Kadhafi lay by the roadside, witness to the bitter fighting for the key oil town, an AFP correspondent reported.

Jubilant rebel fighters told how a strike by international aircraft took out at least two vehicles in a convoy of seven heavily armed pick-up trucks and they finished off the rest with rocket-launchers from their hideout in a eucalyptus grove overlooking the highway.

A crater, five metres wide and two metres deep (16 feet wide and six deep), close by the wrecked trucks, marked where the rebels said the aircraft struck late on Friday.

The force of the blast had transformed one large Ford F150 pick-up into a heap of mangled metal. The cab, sides and the 107mm rocket-launcher mounted on its back had all been blown apart.

The vehicles of the pro-Kadhafi convoy and even the bodies of the dead had been looted during the night and stripped of anything useful -- provisions, clothing and even personal effects.

The rebels had already taken any serviceable guns and ammunition as they seek to make up the huge superiority in weaponry of Kadhafi\'s forces.

Brega, 800 kilometres (500 miles) east of Tripoli, has been the scene of intense exchanges over the past few days when pro-Kadhafi forces returned after being driven out by the rebels.

But it has been unclear since Thursday who actually held the town with the rebel forces regrouping in Ajdabiya, 80 kilometres to the east.

Overnight, fighting flared around the rebel-held city of Misrata and air strikes were reported elsewhere in the country after Kadhafi\'s regime rejected a rebel offer of a ceasefire.

And at the United Nations, the thorny issue of Western governments arming the rebels set alarm bells ringing.

Coalition forces, meanwhile, strafed positions held by loyalist forces in the Al-Khums and Al-Rojban regions east and southwest of the capital Tripoli late Friday, according to Libyan state television.

An Al-Khums resident told AFP he heard explosions coming from a local naval base, about 120 kilometres (70 miles) east of the capital, which had been bombed by coalition forces earlier.

Forces loyal to Kadhafi also attacked the third city of Misrata with tanks and rocket fire, a rebel spokesman said.

In the rebel bastion of Benghazi, Transitional National Council leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil said the opposition was ready for a truce, provided Kadhafi\'s forces end their assaults on rebel-held cities.

But government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim rejected the offer, saying Kadhafi\'s forces would not withdraw from towns they control.

"The rebels never offered peace. They don\'t offer peace, they are making impossible demands," Ibrahim told reporters, calling the truce proposal a "trick".

"We will not leave our cities. We are the government, not them," he said, adding however that the government was always ready to negotiate and wanted peace.

Three Swedish fighter jets were heading for Sardinia en route to taking part in NATO operations in Libya, a military spokesman said.

The three JAS Gripen warplanes, of a total nine aircraft pledged by Sweden, took off from the Ronneby base on Sweden\'s southern coast, army spokesman Rickard Wissman told AFP and another five Gripens and a C-130 Hercules usable for mid-air refueling were to leave early Sunday.

A petition demanding the release of a young Libyan women who stormed into a Tripoli hotel full of journalists and accused government soldiers of raping her was well on the way to reaching its target of half a million signatures on Saturday.

The woman, Iman al-Obeidi, achieved worldwide celebrity after footage of her bursting into the Rixos hotel at breakfast time last Saturday and throwing open her coat to reveal scars and bruises on her body, was posted on the Internet.

"Words cannot express the courage Iman showed in speaking out -- and we can only imagine the terror she must be facing right now in the hands of (Moamer) Kadhafi\'s infamous thugs," said Avaaz.org, organiser of the online campaign.

The petition, which had garnered the support of some 437,500 people by Saturday afternoon, will be delivered by hand to the Turkish consulate in Benghazi as soon as it reaches its target of 500,000 signatures.

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