Weapons awash in Libya’s liberated capital

LIBYA: The crackle of celebratory gunfire still rings out across the city at night, two months after Moamer Kadhafi’s fall, but the wide diffusion of weapons poses a real danger for Libya’s liberated capital.

With a gun slung over his shoulder, Abdelkarim Mahmud watches as two diggers demolish a section of the six-kilometre (3.7 miles) wall that surrounds the Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli, Kadhafi’s former stronghold.

Dressed in combat trousers, a T-shirt and flip-flops, the 19-year-old says he was never trained to use the weapon, which he took from a dead Kadhafi soldier in the town of Misrata in March, when he joined the rebellion.

“I just took the gun and started shooting it,” he told AFP.

Weapons poured into Tripoli during the revolution, with the Kadhafi regime handing out arms to its supporters and the rebels shipping in guns from outside.

Officials say they have seen boys as young as 13 brandishing Kalashnikov rifles in the middle of the night.

“There are tens of thousands of these weapons. It’s a big challenge... The presence of weapons on such a wide scale definitely raises concerns,” Osama al-Abed, the deputy chairman of the Tripoli municipal council, told AFP.

“We are doing all it takes to organise and to make an inventory of where the weapons are.

Some of them are small rifles, some of them are medium to heavy machine guns,” he added.

The nature of the problem was starkly illustrated on Friday, when a gunfight broke out in Abu Salim, a traditionally pro-Kadhafi neighbourhood not far from Bab al-Aziziya, between supporters of the ousted dictator and forces loyal to the National Transitional Council (NTC).

At least three people were killed in the fighting, which spread to other districts in Tripoli and prompted the authorities to mount a clean-up operation that included an appeal to those harbouring weapons to hand them in.

Haytem al-Amari, 25, a pro-NTC resident of Abu Salim says Kadhafi loyalists are hiding guns everywhere.

“We know what happened on Friday is going to happen again and again, until they bring the equipment to find and collect the guns. They are hiding them everywhere, under the sand, behind walls, in their gardens,” he said. AFP