Tripoli

Libya: Main airport shut down, aircraft destroyed

TRIPOLI -- Opposing militias fighting for control over the airport in Tripoli have destroyed 90 percent of the aircraft and shut down Libya's main airport.

The United Nations on July 14 pulled its staff out of Libya where at least 13 people have been killed in fighting in the eastern city of Benghazi and in Tripoli, forcing the closure of the international airport.

Heavy fighting broke out July 13 between rival militias vying for control of Libya’s main airport, killing at least three people and forcing a halt of all flights in the worst fighting in the capital for six months.

Explosions and anti-aircraft gunfire were heard from early morning on the airport road and other parts of Tripoli.

Thousands of Syrian refugee women are caught in a "spiral of hardship, isolation and anxiety," widowed or separated from their husbands and struggling to survive, the UN warned on Tuesday.
      

A Tunisian diplomat and an embassy worker kidnapped earlier this year by unknown gunmen in Libya arrived at dawn on Monday at a Tunis airport after being freed on June 29.
   

Two Turkish citizens were kidnapped in Libya late on June 24 and their whereabouts are still unknown, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official who wanted to remain anonymous has said.

Some 250 Turkish citizens are leaving Libya, after a call from a renegade Libyan general to Turks and Qataris to leave the country’s east within two days or suffer a backlash from the public.

Most Turkish nationals have left the country since the Foreign Ministry issued its own warning, Anadolu Agency quoted Turkey’s Benghazi Council General Ali Sait Akın as saying on June 23.

A Libyan renegade general has called on all Turks and Qataris to leave volatile eastern Libya, accusing the two countries of supporting “terrorism,” his spokesman said June 22.

Illegal border crossing at the EU external borders increased sharply in 2013, rising to over 107,000 from 75,000 in 2012, an EU agency reports.

With just a week to go before local authority elections and two weeks before elections for the European Parliament, party leaders ratcheted up their campaigning over the weekend as new opinion polls put New Democracy, which leads the ruling coalition, and the left-wing opposition SYRIZA neck and neck.