Gaddafi has plan to “blow up” Tripoli: Russian envoy

Russia’s special envoy to Libya told has said that Muammar Gaddafi has a “suicidal plan” to blow up Tripoli if it is taken by the rebels fighting his rule.

“The Libyan premier told me: if the rebels seize the city, we will cover it with missiles and blow it up,” Mikhail Margelov said in an interview with Izvestia newspaper.

“I imagine that the Gaddafi regime does have such a suicidal plan,” he said.

Margelov met Libya’s prime minister in Tripoli last month, but has not met Gaddafi.

Margelov – one of Russia’s more rational politicians, it should be noted – said that while he saw that the regime was running out of fuel stocks, he denied Western reports that it was running low on weapons.

“That the regime is running out of stocks of fuel, I’ve seen personally while in Tripoli. The road from the Tunisian border to the capital is a multikilometer line for gas,” he said. “Gaddafi still has not used a single surface-to-air missile, of which he has more than enough. This leads to doubt that the regime is running out of weapons.”

“Theoretically, Tripoli can run short of ammunition for tanks, for small arms. But the colonel has rockets and explosives in abundance.”