BREGA, Libya - The Libyan air force has bombed the oil refinery and port town of Marsa El Brega as battles between forces loyal and against Muammar Gaddafi continued to rage in several towns across the North African country. The warplane from Gaddafi's air force struck a beach near where the two sides were fighting at a university campus.
A witness said the blast raised a plume of sand from a dune but caused no casualties, apparently an attempt to scare off the anti-Gaddafi fighters besieging regime forces in the campus.- "All the fighters here are massing. We understand that something like 250-300 pro-Gaddafi fighters are inside Brega and they are being surrounded," AlJazeera's correspondent said.
- The bombing of Brega and reports about the fall of Gharyan and Sabratha towns in the country's northwest to pro-Gaddafi forces came as Gaddafi appeared on state television once again.
- Located between Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte , still under government control - and the opposition-held eastern port of Benghazi, Brega also sits near ethnic fault lines between tribes loyal to Gaddafi and eastern groups opposed to him.
- "They tried to take Brega this morning, but they failed," Mustafa Gheriani, a spokesman for the February 17th Coalition, an anti-government group, told the Reuters news agency.
Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland, reporting from Benghazi, Libya's second largest city now controlled by rebels, described the situation in the Brega region as fluid.- Earlier the Associated Press news agency quoted Ahmed Jerksi, manager of the oil installation in Brega, as saying that pro-Gaddafi forces took control of the facility at dawn without using force.
- There were conflicting claims about the casualties from these battles.
- Government forces were also reported to be battling to regain control of rebel-held towns close to Tripoli, trying to create a buffer zone around what is still Gaddafi's seat of power.
Meanwhile, the rebel National Libyan Council in east Libya called for UN-backed air strikes on foreign mercenaries used by Gaddafi against his own people.Hafiz Ghoga, a spokesman for the council based in Benghazi, told a news conference that Gaddafi was using "African mercenaries in Libyan cities" which amounted to an invasion of the oil producing North African nation.
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