Two car bombs strike near shuttered Egyptian, UAE embassies in Libya
Two car bombs struck near the shuttered Egyptian and United Arab Emirates embassies in Libya
TRIPOLI: (AFP) - Two car bombs struck near the shuttered Egyptian and United Arab Emirates embassies in Libya s militia-controlled capital within minutes of each other Thursday, an AFP correspondent and a UAE official said.
Two guards posted outside the empty Egyptian embassy compound were wounded in the first blast, Libya s LANA news agency reported. Three more posted outside the empty UAE compound were wounded in the second, a senior official told AFP in Abu Dhabi. Both governments are considered hostile by the Islamist-led militias which seized Tripoli in August in an offensive during which UAE warplanes carried out strikes against them from neighboring Egypt.
UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan denounced the attack against his country s embassy as a "terrorist act" and blamed it on Islamist militias Fajr Libya and Ansar al-Sharia. Washington has blacklisted the radical Ansar al-Sharia as a terrorist group for its alleged role in a deadly 2012 attack on the US consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, where it is largely in control.
Fajr Libya (Libya Dawn) is a coalition of Islamist militias which seized Tripoli in August after weeks of deadly fighting with a nationalist group. Nahayan, in a statement carried by state news agency WAM, said the bombing "badly damaged" the embassy and wounded three people in the area. The first bomb went off in a car park close to the Egyptian embassy, shattering several of its windows, the AFP correspondent reported.
The second went off minutes later just outside the UAE mission compound, wounding three non-Emirati guards, the official in Abu Dhabi said. "This is an indication of the state of lawlessness in the Tripoli area," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He said the blast showed the need for greater support of Libya s internationally recognized government, which took refuge in the remote east of the country after the militia takeover of the capital. "The unruly condition that we are seeing will deteriorate further if the extremist militias continue to control the Libyan capital," he said.
The recognized government s foreign ministry said such attacks were the result of "the absence of the legitimate state in Tripoli, now in the hands of armed militias which use the threat of arms against citizens, public institutions and diplomatic missions".
