Ministers’ support heartens Libya

Press, 22 April 1986, Page 10

Ministers’ support heartens Libya

NZPA-Reuter Tripoli The Foreign Ministers of six Non-Aligned countries were given a brass band welcome when they arrived in Libya in a show of support after last week’s American bombing raids on Libya. State television reported that the Ministers met the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, yesterday. The Indian Foreign Minister, Mr Bali Ram Bhagat, said that the delegation wanted to show solidarity with Libya "at a time of its greatest crisis, suffering and tribulation.” He said Tuesday’s raids on Tripoli and other centres were totally unjustifiable. Colonel Gadaffi, bolstered by a wave of international sympathy and indignation over the raids, ordered red carpet treatment for the Ministers. City streets that were in darkness for much of last week were strung with lights. A parade including a brass band, a fleet of ’police cars and dozens of slogan-chanting demon-

strators inched through central Tripoli. The Foreign Ministers of Yugoslavia, India, Cuba, Senegal, Ghana, and the Congo were to go to the United Nations in New York later to present a Non-Aligned movement petition urging the Security Council’s condemnation of the raid. Diplomats said that the strong Non-Aligned support was an indication that the Colonel had emerged politically stronger. The United States President, Mr Ronald Reagan, ordered the air raids, saying he had proof that Libya was behind a bomb attack on a West Berlin discotheque, which killed an American Army sergeant and a Turkish woman. Libyan hospitals said the death toll from the raids had risen to 39 and was expected to go higher. Reporters saw at least two patients with serious head injuries in the intensive care unit of Tripoli Central Hospital and doctors said they were near death. Libyan explosive ex-

perts yesterday detonated at a Tripoli suburb more than a dozen unexploded bombs said to have been dropped in Tripoli by American planes. The blasts shook the capital. Reporters toured a naval secondary school 20km west of Tripoli where bombs destroyed dormitories, a restaurant, an officers’ club and a sick bay. Officials said that the evacuation of most of the 300 students on the compound before the bombing had kept injuries to 15. Only two deaths were reported — those of cooks who were preparing breakfast when the planes struck. • Reuter reports from Beirut that a sad and weary group of 31 Britons were moved from Muslim West Beirut yesterday under armed escort after the killing of two British teachers and the abduction of a British television cameraman. With the Britons, mostly teachers and retired people, were a New Zealand teacher, an American journalist, and an Irishman.