A Defiant Qaddafi Says He Survived Attack

Libyan state television broadcast a brief recorded audio message from the Libyan leader at midevening, in which he said he wanted to reassure Libyans concerned about the airstrikes on his Bab al-Aziziya compound early Thursday. At least three huge bombs struck at separate parts of the subterranean network of passages and bunkers.

“I tell the coward crusaders: I live in a place where you can’t get me,” Colonel Qaddafi said. “I live in the hearts of millions.”

The message was broadcast as Libyan officials asserted that another NATO airstrike, on the government-held oil city of Brega, 500 miles from Tripoli and the easternmost stronghold of the Qaddafi forces, had struck a guesthouse early Friday and killed 11 Muslim clerics and injured 45 other clerics and officials who were gathered in the city on what the government officials described as a peace mission.

Moussa Ibrahim, the chief spokesman for the Qaddafi government, said the victims were asleep when the bomb struck, obliterating what had served as an oil company guesthouse until the war here broke out in mid-February. He showed a video of a large group of men whom he described as members of the peace group assembled beside the harbor in Brega at sunset on Thursday, and a separate video, taken on Friday, showing what he described as the bodies of some of the bombing victims arrayed on blankets on a floor.

Mr. Ibrahim’s account could not be independently verified. If confirmed, it would amount to the heaviest civilian toll from a NATO airstrike on a government-controlled area since the bombing began on March 19. A NATO spokeswoman in Brussels, Carmen Romero, confirmed that an attack had been conducted overnight at Brega, striking what she described as a command-and-control center for the Qaddafi forces. “Our targets are solely military,” she said.

The propaganda value that the Qaddafi government saw in the Brega attack was underscored by its decision to hold a news conference about the airstrike at one of the principal mosques in central Tripoli, with rows of Muslim and Orthodox Christian clerics seated under a canopy in the courtyard.

One of the Muslim clerics, Nouri Adin al-Mejrab, called on Muslims around the world to avenge the deaths of the 11 clerics with attacks that would kill 1,000 people for each of those killed in Brega. He said the attacks should take place in the countries that have joined in the NATO air campaign, including the United States, Britain, France, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

“We will call on Muslims around the world to take revenge for all the victims of the NATO attacks,” Mr. Mejrab said. “For every one of our martyrs, we will call on them to take down 1,000 people.”

Other senior clerics warned that the NATO strikes were sowing hatred against the West in Libya and generating a yearning for revenge among a Muslim population that they said had previously been moderate.

For weeks, rabid anti-Western rhetoric has been intensifying among Libyan officials and finding a voice among the small crowds of pro-Qaddafi demonstrators who turn up wherever foreign reporters are taken by a government corps of minders and guides. While staged for television cameras, the threats seem likely to lead to heightened vigilance among Western counterterrorism officials, who are already on high alert in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Libya’s huge secret intelligence apparatus, developed under Colonel Qaddafi’s 40-year rule, has shown on many occasions that it can strike back at Libya’s Western foes. The worst of the attacks was in December 1988, when a bomb planted by Libyan agents exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.

The Qaddafi government’s campaign against the NATO bombings has been weakened recently by the government’s propensity to make unconvincing propaganda out of the strikes — inaccurately representing the targets, and the victims, as purely civilian, for example, and disguising the targets’ military significance, not always effectively.

That appeared to be the case on a guided tour for reporters of the Bab al-Aziziya leadership compound on Thursday, when officials described the three bombs as errant strikes that had killed three civilians, while striking nothing of strategic value.