Tripoli: Libyan revolutionaries Sunday rejected an offer by Muammar Gaddafi to negotiate and said they have captured the eastern town of Bin Jawad, forcing regime loyalists to flee after days of fighting.
Libyan fighters closed in on Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte from both east and west Sunday.
Fierce fighting was also raging in the west of the country as fighters trying to take full control of the region said they had fallen into an ambush in a town southwest of Zuwarah. Opposition fighters moved to within 30km of Sirte from the west and captured Bin Jawad 100km to the east.
With Gaddafi on the run, his spokesman Mousa Ebrahim called The Associated Press to say Gaddafi is still in Libya and offering to have his son, Al Sa'adi, lead talks with the revolutionaries on forming a transitional government.
Mahmoud Shammam, the information minister in the National Transitional Council, rejected the offer.
"I would like to state very clearly, we don't recognise them. We are looking at them as criminals. We are going to arrest them very soon," he said. "Talking about negotiations is a daydream for what remains of the dictatorship."
Meanwhile, more signs emerged of arbitrary killings of detainees and civilians by the regime as the opposition swept into Tripoli earlier this week, including some 50 charred corpses found in a makeshift lockup near a military base that had been run by the Khamis Brigade, an elite unit commanded by Gaddafi's son, Khamis.
Mabrouk Abdullah, who said he survived a massacre by Gaddafi's forces, also told The Associated Press that guards opened fired at some 130 civilian detainees in a hangar near the military base, and fired again when prisoners tried to flee.
Abdullah, who was at the site Sunday, said he and other prisoners were told by a guard they would be released on Tuesday. Instead, guards threw hand grenades and opened fire at detainees huddling in a hangar.
Abdullah said he had been crouching along a wall and was shot in his side, lifting his shirt to show his injury. As survivors of the initial attack tried to flee, they came under fire again, he said.
Killings
The killings by Gaddafi troops appeared to have taken place in the past week, as fighters gradually took control of Tripoli, according to a witness and international rights groups.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said yesterday it has gathered evidence indicating that loyalists killed at least 17 detainees and arbitrarily executed dozens of civilians as fighters moved into Tripoli.
Reporters touring Tripoli have found clusters of decomposing corpses in several areas of the capital, including a roundabout near Gaddafi's Bab Al Aziziya stronghold.
"The evidence we have been able to gather so far strongly suggests that government forces went on a spate of arbitrary killing as Tripoli was falling," said Sarah Leah Witson of Human Rights Watch.
