Rebels offer $2m bounty for Khadafy’s capture

The rebels claimed breakthroughs on other fronts, saying their fighters had started battling for Sabha, another of the colonel’s stronghold in the south, and in Zwara in the west, where they said they had captured a military base.

Sporadic firefights continued in Tripoli, a sign that control of the city could not be claimed by either side. In a show of strength, the rebels flooded the city’s thoroughfares with the mud-splattered trucks of their fighting brigades. In another sign of the power shifts underway, Khadafy’s loyalists abruptly released more than 30 foreign journalists they had held captive in the Rixos Hotel here. Over the weekend, media members were taken captive at gunpoint as the rebels advanced on the capital and were left in the Rixos.

“Rixos crisis ends. All journalists are out!’’ Matthew Chance, a CNN correspondent, posted on Twitter as he and the others were allowed to leave the hotel with the aid of Red Cross workers who took them away.

Later in the day, the elation was tempered with word that four Italian journalists were abducted and their driver killed outside Tripoli, in territory nominally under rebel control. Italian consular officials said the journalists, abducted by unknown gunmen, were being held by Khadafy loyalists in an apartment near Bab al-Aziziya, Khadafy’s captured compound and residence.

Khadafy was not at home when rebels stormed the fortress. He said in an address broadcast early yesterday on a local Tripoli radio station that his retreat from the compound was a tactical maneuver. He blamed months of NATO airstrikes for bringing down his government and vowed “martyrdom’’ or victory in his battle against the alliance. Urging Libyan tribes across the land to march on the capital, he said, “I call on all Tripoli residents, with all its young, old, and armed brigades, to defend the city, to cleanse it, to put an end to the traitors and kick them out of our city.

“These gangs seek to destroy Tripoli,’’ he said, referring to the rebels. “They are evil incarnate. We should fight them.’’

In the eastern city of Benghazi, the base of the rebel uprising, the head of the rebel Transitional National Council told a news conference yesterday that Libyan businessmen had contributed 2 million dinars, about $1.7 million, for the capture of Khadafy dead or alive.

“We fear a catastrophe because of his behavior,’’ the rebel leader, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, told reporters there.

The rebel leaders in Benghazi also called on loyalists in Surt, more than 200 miles east of Tripoli, to join them and said they had directed rebel fighting units to close in on Surt from Misurata in the west and the port city of Ras Lanuf in the east.

The rebel military units from Misurata, which have emerged as the opposition’s most able fighters, have encountered little resistance. But there were reports yesterday that rebel brigades approaching from the east were stalled in Bin Jawad, a hamlet that has tripped up the rebels during previous attempts to advance on Surt.

Elsewhere, though, there were signs of loyalist disarray. Al-Arabiya television reported that the rebels had taken control of an army base in Zwara, a coastal city about halfway between Tripoli and the Tunisian border. There was no immediate confirmation of the report about the base, Mazraq al-Shams, which had been heavily contested for days. As diplomacy accelerated in the new dynamics surrounding the conflict, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France met with Mahmoud Jibril, the Libyan rebel organization’s prime minister, in Paris. Sarkozy told journalists afterward that he had offered medical assistance and said, “We are prepared to continue military operations as long as our Libyan friends need them.’’

France was the first country to recognize the Benghazi-based rebels and played a central role in the NATO air campaign, along with the United States and Britain.

At the United Nations, the United States requested the Security Council unfreeze $1.5 billion in Libyan assets for the rebels in a move it said was aimed at providing urgent humanitarian assistance. Diplomats said the money would also be used to help assure the power supply in Tripoli, rebuild the Libyan economy, and pay government salaries.