Libya's interim rulers said on Wednesday they had captured one of Col Muammar Gaddafi's last strongholds deep in the Sahara desert, finding chemical weapons, and largely taken control of another.
| Was that a real chem weapons plant or just a plant that produced pesticides. You know, for all the farms out there in the interior of Libya. In the Sahara... |
| Ants. They've got lots and lots of ants in the desert. Also scorpions and spiders. So they'd need tons of the stuff -- it's a big desert, you know, and one just can't be worrying about sitting on an ant hill or finding a scorpion in one's boots in the morning. |
With the National Transitional Council (NTC) struggling to assert full control over the country, military spokesmen said its forces had seized the outpost of Jufra 435 miles southeast of Tripoli, and most of Sabha.
"The whole of the Jufra area -- we have been told it has been liberated," said Fathi Bashaagha, NTC spokesman, in Misurata. "There was a depot of chemical weapons and now it is under the control of our fighters."
His comments could not be confirmed independently.
Under Gaddafi, Libya was supposed to have destroyed its stockpile of chemical weapons in early 2004 as part of a rapprochement with the West under which it also abandoned a nuclear programme.
| Cheez, you mean an evil, thuggish brute of a dictator .. lied to us? |
However, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons says Libya kept 9.5 tonnes of mustard gas at a secret desert location, although it could no longer deliver it. |