[Bangla Daily Star] Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffy... a proud Arab institution for 42 years ...
crossed into neighbouring Tunisia and fought a shootout with Tunisian troops in a frontier town yesterday as Libya's conflict spilled beyond its borders.
Pro-Qadaffy forces fired shells into the town of Dehiba, damaging buildings and injuring at least one resident, and a group of them drove into the town in a truck in pursuit of anti-Qadaffy rebels.
The Libyan government troops were chasing rebels from the restive Western Mountains region of Libya who decamped into Tunisia in the past few days after Qadaffy forces overran the border post the rebels had earlier seized.
Government tanks launched a fresh assault on Misrata, rebels said.
"Four tanks attacked the city and one has been destroyed so far," said Ibrahim Ahmed Boushagha, a rebel fighter who accompanied a maimed man back from the front in Misrata.
"They took up positions during the night on the airport road, and tried to enter the city. We've stopped them at the outer limits, at least for now."
He said his group had come under mortar and rocket-propelled grenade fire, and three or four of them were maimed.
AFP journalists reported whistling sounds followed by a volley of detonations from the direction of the airport early afternoon, with an enormous plume of grey smoke rising over the area.
A constant stream of casualties was brought in to the city's main hospital, with several rebels saying the men had been maimed in a counter-attack by regime forces.
Earlier, fierce festivities and continuous kabooms were heard in the suburbs, an AFP journalist said, and at midday the hospital reported a toll of two dead and 16 maimed.
Dr Khalid Abu Falra of the city's medical committee said that a small clinic in the western suburbs also reported at least three deaths.
Western Misrata also came under seemingly indiscriminate mortar and rocket fire yesterday as a NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants...
warplane flew overhead, witnesses and medics said.
While the Libyan forces were battling in Dehiba, the rebels who are fighting to end more than four decades of Qadaffy's rule announced they had seized back the border post.
Rebels seized the post a week ago, as it controls the only road link which their comrades in Libya's Western Mountains have with the outside world, making them rely otherwise on rough tracks for supplies of food, fuel and medicine.
After weeks of advances and retreats by rebel and government forces along the Mediterranean coast, fighting has settled into a pattern of festivities and skirmishes.
The fighting for the crossing between Dehiba in Tunisia and Wazin on the Libyan side was typical of the fluid and confused conflict, which broke out in mid-February.
Some of Qadaffy's soldiers were killed and maimed in the fighting in Dehiba. Two residents told Rooters that shells had fallen on the town from pro-Qadaffy positions across the border in Libya.
"Rounds from the bombardment are falling on houses.... A Tunisian woman was injured," one of the residents, called Ali, told Rooters by telephone.
He said later the fighting and shelling had stopped. "The Tunisian army is combing the town. We have no idea about the fate of Qadaffy's forces there because the Tunisian army closed the gates to the town and nobody is allowed to enter."