Kadhafi vows to defeat NATO

Libya's Moamer Kadhafi vowed Friday to defeat NATO as his forces launched a deadly rocket assault on rebel-held Misrata but lost a key stretch of road towards Tunisia's border.

Mahmud Jibril of the opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) meanwhile denied suggestions by a Russian envoy that the rebel leadership had been negotiating with his regime.

State television aired Kadhafi's comments in what it said was a live telephone call from the Libyan leader, who has gone underground since Western nations began waging an air war in March to protect civilians from a bloody protest crackdown.

"They will be defeated, NATO is bound to be defeated," Kadhafi said in the speech broadcast on loudspeakers in Tripoli's Green Square as thousands of flag-waving regime supporters staged their biggest rally for weeks.

"We are determined to change nothing in our country other than by our own free will, not because of the alliance's planes... We are resisting, we are fighting," he declared.

"If they come to the ground, we will wait for them, but they are cowards, they will not dare," he said in reference to NATO's insistance it will not deploy ground troops on Libyan soil in line with a UN resolution.

Kadhafi called on Libyans to prepare to liberate their country: "Get ready men and women to free Libya inch by inch."

His speech came hours after loud explosions shook Tripoli, where Kadhafi has his residence, as NATO warplanes constantly overflew the Libyan capital, an AFP reporter said.

In rebels' western enclave of Misrata, Kadhafi loyalists killed 10 people and wounded 40 when they pounded the lifeline port city with a volley of Grad rockets, rebel spokesman Ahmed Hassan told AFP.

All the victims were civilians, he said, and were hit when rockets slammed into the western and eastern gates of the city. The body of one of the dead, a woman, was found in the rubble of her house.

Hassan said Misrata was still the target of near daily bombardment by Kadhafi loyalists, and that there had been no air strikes by the NATO-led coalition on the embattled strongman's forces on Friday.

Elsewhere, a road linking the towns of Zintan and Yafran was under the complete control of the insurgents and dotted with destroyed tanks and abandoned government vehicles, an AFP correspondent said.

The road, a key sector of the route to the border with Tunisia, was seized two days after the rebels overran the nearby villages of Ghanymma, Lawania and Zawit Bagoul.

In the Italian city of Naples, where NATO's Libya operation is headquartered, Jibril, the head of international affairs in the NTC, dismissed reports the opposition was in negotiations with the Kadhafi regime.

"I can assure you there is and there was no negotiation between the NTC and the regime," said Jibril.

At a joint news conference with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, Jibril said that were negotiations to take place, the NTC would "announce it out of commitment to our friends all over the world".

Russian envoy Mikhail Margelov said Friday that Kadhafi representatives had made contact with the rebels in European capitals including Berlin, Paris and Oslo.

Margelov had said on a one day visit to Tripoli on Thursday that the contacts had only taken place in Paris, although he did not disclose the nature of the supposed negotiations.

France said it had no knowledge of the negotiations.

"If there have been direct contacts, we're not involved and we didn't set them up," foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said.

Mahmudi said on Thursday Kadhafi's departure was a "red line" that cannot be crossed, despite growing international calls for him to quit and the armed insurrection against his 41-year rule.

An NTC official in the opposition stronghold Benghazi in eastern Libya told AFP on Friday that their position was unchanged.

"Kadhafi must go. Anyone from the rebel side who negotiates his staying in power would immediately have an NTC arrest warrant issued against him," the official said, on condition of anonymity.

And NATO on Friday slammed as "cynical" an offer in an Italian newspaper interview by Moamer Kadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam, that the regime in Tripoli was ready to organise internationally supervised elections.

"Once again, it is an instance of what I would call a cynical PR ploy," said alliance spokeswoman Oana Lungescu during a news briefing on the military campaign.

"It is hard to imagine that after 41 years in which Kadhafi abolished elections, the constitution, political parties, trade unions... (that) overnight a dictator would turn into a democrat."

Powers plot 'post-Kadhafi' future as rebels eye cash

Major powers met on Thursday to map out what the United States calls an inevitable "post-Kadhafi Libya" as Italy promised hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) in aid to answer rebel pleas for funds.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and counterparts from NATO and other countries participating in air strikes against Moamer Kadhafi's administration held their third round of Libya talks in the United Arab Emirates capital Abu Dhabi.

"Kadhafi's days are numbered. We are working with our international partners through the UN to plan for the inevitable: a post-Kadhafi Libya," Clinton told participants, according to her prepared remarks distributed by aides.

"Time is on our side," the chief US diplomat said, adding the international military, economic and political pressure was mounting on the Libyan colonel who has been in power for four decades.

"In the days ahead," she said, "we have to coordinate the many plans taking shape and work closely" with the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) and the Libyan people.

"Each of these efforts helps us to protect the Libyan people and lay the groundwork for a unified, democratic, and peaceful future," she said.

But Clinton offered no direct US financial contribution to the rebels, pledging instead another "$26.5 million to help all the victims of this conflict, including Libyan refugees."

Such money will likely be distributed through relief agencies.

US officials said the United States would urge Arab countries to offer more funds to the rebel administration based in Libya's second city of Benghazi.

Italy meanwhile will provide Libya's rebel council with loans and fuel products worth 300 to 400 million euros ($438 million to $584 million), an Italian foreign ministry spokesman Maurizio Massari said.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, the former colonial power in Libya, is co-chairing the meeting which is aimed to establish a financial mechanism to help the rebels' NTC.

The minister of oil and finance in the Libyan rebel council, Ali Tarhoni, warned that "if no financial concrete support comes out of this conference, we will consider that a total failure."

He said he hoped that at the very least Western governments would extend loans to the opposition secured on the billions of dollars of assets of the Kadhafi government frozen abroad.

The opposition has complained that it has seen nothing concrete since the contact group last met on May 5 in Rome when the powers agreed to set up a fund to aid the rebels and promised to tap frozen Kadhfi assets.

Two dozen countries, including key NATO allies Britain, France and Italy, as well as delegates from the United Nations, the Arab League, the African Union and the Organisation of Islamic Conference are attending the talks.

A US official told reporters on condition of anonymity on Wednesday that Washington cannot say whether the NTC "is ready to assume complete control" even if Kadhafi's fall is only a matter of time.

He also cautioned that there was no international consensus over when Kadhafi should leave power, where he should go, or even whether he should leave Libya.

The talks among the powers came amid continuing explosions in the Libyan capital. Four blasts shook Tripoli on Thursday afternoon, an AFP journalist said, although unable to pinpoint their location. During Wednesday night into Thursday other explosions echoed through the city from near Kadhafi's compound, an AFP correspondent reported.

The Western alliance said it carried out 47 strike sorties on Wednesday, hitting a vehicle storage facility in Tripoli and a missile storage facility, a missile site, a command and control facility, a tank, and four armoured fighting vehicles just outside.

NATO said it also hit an electronic warfare vehicle and a military training camp near Libya's third-largest city Misrata.

The Mediterranean coastal city is the most significant rebel-held enclave in western Libya and a rebel spokesman said up to 3,000 Kadhafi troops attacked it in a three-pronged movement from the south, west and east on Wednesday.

Twelve people were killed and 33 wounded in the fighting in which Kadhafi's forces deployed gunships, tanks and Grad rocket launchers as well as mortars, the spokesman, Hassan al-Galai, told AFP by telephone from the city.