MISRATA, Libya – Grad rockets exploded in Misrata on Sunday despite a vow by the Libyan regime to halt its fire in the besieged city where the humanitarian situation has stirred international concern.
In a Misrata hospital, meanwhile, two captured pro-Kadhafi soldiers told AFP that loyalist forces were losing their grip in the battle for the western port.
"Many soldiers want to surrender but they are afraid of being executed" by the rebels, said Lili Mohammed, a Mauritanian hired by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi's regime to fight insurgents in the country's third city.
"Kadhafi forces are losing" in Misrata, said Misbah Mansuri, 25, another wounded loyalist who said he was forcibly enlisted 45 days ago.
Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said early on Sunday the army had suspended operations against rebels in Misrata, but not left the city, to enable local tribes to find a peaceful solution.
"The armed forces have not withdrawn from Misrata. They have simply suspended their operations," he told a news conference in Tripoli.
"The tribes are determined to solve the problem within 48 hours... We believe that this battle will be settled peacefully and not militarily," Kaim said.
But Colonel Omar Bani, military spokesman of the rebels' Transitional National Council, said Kadhafi was "playing a really dirty game" aimed at dividing his opponents.
"It is a trick, they didn't go," Bani said in the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi. "They have stayed a bit out of Tripoli Street but they are preparing themselves to attack again."
Libyan authorities want the conflict to look like a civil war between rival tribes, he argued.
Kaim had previously announced the army would withdraw from Misrata and leave local tribes to resolve the conflict at the local level, either by negotiations or through force.
But later on Sunday bursts of automatic weapons fire could be heard and Grad rockets exploded in the city, the scene of deadly urban guerrilla fighting for several weeks between rebels and Kadhafi loyalists.
At least six people were killed and 34 wounded in Sunday's fighting, said Doctor Khalid Abu Falra at Misrata's main private clinic.
Misrata suffered its heaviest toll in 65 days of fighting on Saturday, with 28 dead and 100 wounded compared with a daily average of 11 killed, according to Falra.
"We're overwhelmed, overwhelmed. We lack everything: personnel, equipment and medicines," he said.
In western Libya, Kadhafi's forces bombed areas close to the Dehiba border post with Tunisia in a bid to recapture the nearby town of Wazzan, witnesses said.
And NATO warplanes staged raids on civil and military sites in Tripoli and other cities, state news agency JANA said, without giving casualty numbers.
On Sunday, US Senator John McCain, who visited the rebel stronghold of Benghazi last week, urged Washington to increase its air strikes on Libya, warning a prolonged stalemate would probably draw Al-Qaeda into the conflict.
"The longer we delay, the more likely it is there's a stalemate. And if you're worried about Al-Qaeda entering into this fight, nothing would bring Al-Qaeda in more rapidly and more dangerously than a stalemate," McCain told NBC's "Meet the Press."
"It's pretty obvious to me that the US has got to play a greater role on the air power side."
Kadhafi's regime accused the United States, which on Saturday launched its first Predator drone strike on a rocket launcher targeting Misrata, of "new crimes against humanity" for deploying the low-flying, unmanned aircraft.
In his traditional Easter Sunday message, Pope Benedict XVI called for "diplomacy and dialogue" in Libya.
"In the current conflict in Libya, may diplomacy and dialogue take the place of arms and may those who suffer as a result of the conflict be given access to humanitarian aid," he said.
A French journalist shot in the neck in Misrata was in intensive care on Sunday after undergoing surgery, medics said. Friends refused to identify the journalist, a blogger who worked for "alternative media."
And Manu Brabo, a Spanish photographer who has been held for almost three weeks, has phoned his parents for the first time to say he is being well treated in a military prison in Tripoli, Spanish radio said.
At the western gate into Ajdabiya, a lull in the fighting has given families some respite in their search for loved ones who have gone missing in and around the strategic crossroads city.
"As things calm down, people are building up the courage to come out and report," said Najim Miftah, a volunteer who has a binder of missing people that has doubled in two days with more than 70 new records.
NATO said it had kept a "high operational tempo" of more than 3,000 sorties, nearly half of them strikes, since the transatlantic military alliance assumed full control of the mission at the end of last month.
An aid ship delivered 160 tonnes of food and medicine to Misrata on Saturday and evacuated around 1,000 stranded migrant workers and wounded civilians to Benghazi on its return.
Hundreds of people had lined up along the harbour front in hope of getting on board the vessel chartered by the International Organisation for Migration.
The fourth such rotation brought to 4,100 the number of people of 21 different nationalities evacuated by the IOM from Misrata since the launch of a humanitarian programme on 14 April, the organisation said.
Tunisian officials, meanwhile, said a Qatari vessel has evacuated 90 wounded people to Tunisia, including children, women and elderly people.
The UN refugee agency says about 15,000 people have fled fighting in western Libya into Tunisia in the past two weeks and a much larger exodus was feared. It also says that more than 570,000 people have fled Libya since February 15.
Kuwait on Sunday gave 50 million dinars ($180 million) to the opposition Transitional National Council, its chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil said.
And in another diplomatic success for the rebels, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said on Sunday he would soon also visit Benghazi to open a consulate, following in the footsteps of McCain.
Massive protests in February -- inspired by the revolts that toppled long-time autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia -- escalated into war when Kadhafi's troops fired on demonstrators and protesters seized several eastern towns.
The battle lines have been more or less static in recent weeks, however, as NATO air strikes have helped block Kadhafi's eastward advance but failed to give the poorly organised and outgunned rebels a decisive victory. AFP
