Libyan clashes: According to the spokesperson of Tripoli’s Emergency Medicine and Support Centre, the death toll from fighting in Libya’s capital on Monday and Tuesday was 55 dead and 146 injured.
The confrontations were the bloodiest in Tripoli in years, and they ended late Tuesday when one side gave over the head of a rival faction, whose seizure had sparked the fighting, to a neutral force.
The clashes began on Monday, following the detention of the 444 Brigade’s commander, Colonel Mahmoud Hamza, by the rival Special Deterrence Force, according to an interior ministry spokesman.
In August of last year, 32 people were killed and 159 were injured in Tripoli during fights between Libya’s fragmented governments, which compete for control through shifting alliances with combat groups on the ground.
Since the NATO-backed rebellion that overthrew Gaddafi, Libya has seen more than a decade of intermittent violence.
The social council in the eastern suburb of Souq al-Jumaa, a stronghold of the Special Deterrence Force, announced late Tuesday that an agreement had been reached with Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, head of the UN-recognized government in the capital, for Hamza to be handed over to a “neutral party.”
According to the Emergency Medical Centre, 234 families were evacuated from front-line areas in the capital’s southern suburbs, as well as scores of physicians and paramedics who were caught by the fighting while caring for the wounded.
