21 February,2011 07:07 AM IST | | Agencies
Libyan forces fired machine-guns at mourners marching in a funeral for anti-government protesters in the eastern city of Benghazi Sunday, a day after commandos and foreign mercenaries loyal to longtime leader Moammar Gaddafi pummeled demonstrators with assault rifles and other heavy weaponry.
Demonstrators supporting the people of Libya protest in front of the White House in Washington, DC
A doctor at one Benghazi hospital said 15 people died in yesterday's clashes. Earlier he said his morgue had received at least 200 dead from six days of unrest. The doctor said his hospital, one of two in Libya's second-largest city, is out of supplies and cannot treat more than 70 wounded in similar attacks on mourners Saturday and other clashes.
The crackdown in oil-rich Libya is shaping up to be the most brutal repression of anti-government protests that began with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The protests spread quickly around the region to Bahrain in the Gulf, Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and outside the Middle East to places including Djibouti and China.
Gaddafi has been trying to bring his country out of isolation, announcing in 2003 that he was abandoning his program for weapons of mass destruction, renouncing terrorism and compensating victims of the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in Berlin and the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.
