LIVE Libyan Unrest: October 13, 2011

Posted on October 13, 2011 by KLN1

3:00pm: Islamic hard-liners have attacked about a half-dozen shrines in and around Tripoli belonging to Muslim sects whose practices they see as sacrilegious, raising religious tensions as Libya struggles to define its identity after Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster.
Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, head of the governing National Transitional Council, reacted with alarm to reports that graves were being desecrated and appealed to a top Muslim cleric, al-Sadek al-Gheriani, to issue a fatwa, or religious ruling, on the issue.

He also called for restraint. “I ask those destroying these mosques to stop doing that because this is not the time to do that,” Abdel-Jalil said on Tuesday at a news conference. “What they did is not on the side of the revolution.”

2:00pm: National Transitional Council [NTC] forces pulled back under ferocious fire from Muammar Gaddafi loyalists in the fugitive leader’s hometown Sirte on Thursday, an AFP correspondent reported. “We have been told to retreat to the police HQ and will be using artillery cannon to hit Gaddafi’s forces,” fighter Hamid Neji of the Martys of Free Libya Brigade told AFP on the new front line.

1:00pm: The Italian firm Eni oil has started transferring natural gas through the Greenstream pipeline connecting Libya and Italy for the first time in eight months. Eni said on Thursday that it will run initial tests of 3 million cubic meters worth of gas a day during the preliminary phase.

12:00pm: A senior military commander inside Sirte said on Thursday that Motassim remained on the run, denying reports that he was in custody. “It is not true that Motassim was captured,” said Wesam Bin Hamid, brigade commander of the Martyrs of Free Libya Brigade, one of the new regime’s main units inside Gaddafi’s hometown. “But some prisoners we have captured are saying that [Muammar] Gaddafi is in Sirte,” Bin Hamid added.

7:36am: In response to the situation in Libya, China’s Red Cross Society (RCSC) will send 50 million yuan (about 7.8 million U.S. dollars) in humanitarian aid to the north African country, the society said on Thursday.

The first relief shipment reached Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, on Aug. 18, the society said in a statement, adding that the second shipment, which will include medicine, rice and cooking oil, will arrive in Tripoli by Oct. 15.