TRIPOLI — Kidnappers seized Egypt’s cultural attache and three other embassy staff in the Libyan capital on Saturday a day after a group snatched another Egyptian official in the city.
Meanwhile, the toll from clashes in the south and west rose to 154 dead and 463 wounded, a further sign of the chronic instability that has plagued Libya since the 2011 uprising ousted dictator Muammar Qadhafi.
The four diplomats were kidnapped early on Saturday morning, a Libyan foreign ministry spokesman said.
“The cultural attache and three other staff were kidnapped in Tripoli,” Said Lassoued told AFP.
The abductions came a day after an unknown group seized an administrative adviser at Egypt’s embassy, and despite Libya’s announcement of “reinforced security measures” there.
Foreigners have been targeted several times in recent weeks: two Italians were seized last week in east Libya and a South Korean trade representative was released by security forces on Wednesday, three days after he was abducted in Tripoli.
Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was himself briefly abducted by a militia last October.
A Libyan security official would not rule out that Friday’s kidnapping of the Egyptian was a response to the arrest in Egypt on Friday of a prominent former rebel commander who fought in the uprising.
Shaaban Hadeia, head of the operations centre of Libya’s Thuwar (revolutionaries), was arrested in Alexandria, the source added.
The operations centre had posted on Facebook that there could be a “possible reaction from the thuwars”.
But one of the group’s leaders, Adel Al Ghariani, told AFP they were not involved in the kidnappings and called for Hadeia’s release.
The presidency of the General National Congress, Libya’s highest political authority, also ordered its mission in Cairo to demand an explanation for the ex-rebel leader’s arrest and to seek his release.
Cairo has yet to confirm his detention.
Unrest in the south
Libya has struggled to integrate into the security forces rebel groups that helped topple Qadhafi. Some militias have carved out their own fiefdoms, each with its own ideology and regional allegiances.
The situation is also dire in eastern Libya, where radical Islamists have been accused of launching dozens of attacks on security forces and Western interests, mostly in second city Benghazi.
Two blasts hit Benghazi on Saturday without causing any casualties, one targeting a military intelligence base and the other a Koranic school.
Security forces said on Friday they had arrested four people with a “list of officers who had already been assassinated and to assassinate” in an operation that left one soldier dead.
Authorities are also facing unrest elsewhere in the country, and the toll from two weeks of clashes in the south and west rose on Saturday to 154 dead and 463 wounded, the health ministry said.
The ministry said the toll included those killed in ethnic clashes in the main southern city of Sebha and in Wershefana, west of Tripoli.
Security sources said they had launched an operation last week against “armed gangs”, allegedly including Qadhafi supporters in Wershefana, seen as a bastion of loyalists to the former regime.
Earlier, the director of the hospital in Sebha had said 88 people had died and more than 130 wounded in the ethnic violence in the south.
“Between the outbreak of the fighting on January 11 and Friday evening, the number of dead totalled 88,” Abdallah Ouheida said.
He said the toll was almost certainly higher as casualties had also been taken to other hospitals.
He added there had been sporadic clashes on Saturday but no new reports of casualties.
The fighting erupted between members of the Toubou minority, a non-Arab ethnic group, and armed Arab tribesmen of the Awled Sleiman.
There has since been fighting between the Awled Sleiman and other Arab tribes that is reported to have involved Qadhafi supporters.
Libya’s General National Congress declared a state of emergency in the south on January 18 at an extraordinary session to discuss the violence in Sebha.
