Snipers shot protesters, artillery and helicopter gunships were used against crowds of demonstrators, and thugs armed with hammers and swords attacked families in their homes as the Libyan regime sought to crush the uprising.
"Dozens were killed ... We are in the midst of a massacre here," a witness told Reuters. The man said he helped take victims to hospital in Benghazi.
Libyan Muslim leaders told security forces to stop killing civilians, responding to a spiralling death toll from unrest which threatens veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi's authority.
Mourners leaving a funeral for protesters in the eastern city of Benghazi came under fire, killing at least 15 people and wounding many more. A hospital official said one of those who died was apparently struck on the head by an anti-aircraft missile, and many had been shot in the head and chest.
The hospital was overwhelmed and people were streaming to the facility to donate blood. "Many of the dead and the injured are relatives of doctors here," he said. "They are crying and I keep telling them to please stand up and help us."
Saturday's new deaths are in addition to the 84 people believed to have been killed by Friday night, in the brutal government response, with fears that the eventual toll will prove much higher.
The five-day uprising in eastern Libya has been the greatest challenge to the 42-year rule of Col Gaddafi, the world's longest-serving ruler. With internet and phone lines to the outside world disrupted, it was unclear whether the revolt inspired by the revolutions in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt was spreading from the impoverished east of Libya to the capital Tripoli, or whether it was being successfully extinguished.
It was centred on Benghazi, 600 miles east of the capital, where a human rights activist lawyer was arrested on Tuesday. Chanting crowds, tens of thousands strong, filled the streets and police reportedly fled or joined the protesters, as unrest spread to surrounding towns. Fighting also broke out in the cities of Al-Bayda, Ajdabiya, Zawiya, and Darnah, with witnesses reporting piles of dead. Hospitals made frantic appeals for blood to treat wards full of wounded people.
Libyan special forces launched a dawn attack on Saturday against hundreds of protesters, including lawyers and judges, camped in front of the courthouse in Benghazi. "They fired tear gas on protesters in tents and cleared the areas after many fled carrying the dead and the injured," one protester said by phone from the city.
Video clips on the internet showed jubilant crowds at the start of the protest smashing down concrete statues of their ruler's Little Green Book, containing his sayings, and fighting running street battles with security forces. There were smaller protests in Tripoli, a stronghold of the Gaddafi family whose population received a much better share of Libya's oil wealth.
Colonel Gaddafi himself was shown on state-run television driving in a motorcade through Tripoli, surrounded by cheering supporters pumping their fists in the air and chanting slogans of support.
The pro-government Al-Watania newspaper praised Colonel Gaddafi, who came to power in a bloodless coup in 1969, and insisted the people were uniting with the government against "traitors of the West". Foreign media were exaggerating the scale of the violence, it said.
Reports from Benghazi gave a very different picture of the crisis, describing how the city's residents battled brutal security forces sent from the capital. One man, who gave his name only as Mohammed, told the BBC: "The army are joining the people, the people are going out of their homes and fighting street by street and they are winning."
A Benghazi cleric, Abellah al-Warfali, said he had a list of 16 people who had been killed, most with bullet wounds to the head and chest. "I saw with my own eyes a tank crushing two people in a car," he said. "They didn't do any harm to anyone."
Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8335934/Libya-protests-140-massacred-as-Gaddafi-sends-in-snipers-to-crush-dissent.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d6160096b34e051%2C0
Libya ruling dictator has been in power for over 42 years and says he is for the people. The obvious lie is clear and his tactics against the protesters show how much he is there to serve the people.
Sending snipers and ordering to shoot to kill, many of the protesters consider him insane and libya is not the beautiful place Gaddafi wishes to display.
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