June 19, 2011
NATO Admits Missile Hit a Civilian Home in Tripoli
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
TRIPOLI, Libya -- NATO acknowledged Sunday that an errant missile had destroyed a civilian home in the Libyan capital in the early morning, saying it may have killed civilians. It was the alliance's first such admission in the three-month-long campaign of airstrikes against the military forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Reporters taken to the site and a nearby hospital saw at least five bodies, including those of a baby and a child. Libyan officials said at least four more civilians were killed.
The episode was NATO's second admission of a mistaken strike in two days. On Saturday, it acknowledged inadvertently hitting a rebel convoy of tanks and military vehicles moving around the front near the eastern oil port of Brega. That strike was at least NATO's third to accidentally hit rebels.
NATO officials have been talking openly of strains in the Libyan operation. In Washington, the mistaken strikes could bolster Congressional criticisms that the operation is too unfocused or too dependent on ill-equipped European allies.
In a statement, [1] NATO said that a bomb intended for a "military missile site" had missed and instead "may have caused a number of civilian casualties."
"NATO regrets the loss of innocent civilian lives," Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, the commander of the Libyan mission, said in the statement, blaming a possible "weapons system failure."
NATO said it had conducted 11,500 sorties "with tremendous care to minimize civilian casualties." The Qaddafi government has often claimed that the strikes have killed hundreds of civilians. But until Sunday's bombing, the Qaddafi government's attempts to show journalists proof of civilian casualties have been contradicted by witnesses or lacking in evidence or specific details.
In a statement in response to the attack, the Libyan foreign minister, Abdulati al-Obeidi, called "for all Muslims to initiate a global jihad against the oppressive criminal West." The secular Libyan government offered no explanation for its uncharacteristic use of Islamist language.
Neighbors who witnessed Sunday's attack said it took place at about 1:15 a.m., at the same time that foreign journalists lodged at the Rixos Hotel in the capital heard a large blast rattle windows. A few moments later, an agitated Qaddafi spokesman began urgently summoning the reporters for a bus ride to the bombing site, saying that the bodies of civilians were still in the rubble.
When the journalists arrived, a body was sitting in an open ambulance. Another was carried out as emergency workers and neighborhood men pulled away the wreckage of a large cinderblock home. A short while later, reporters were taken to the Tripoli hospital and shown the bodies of a third adult and a baby, laid alongside the first two. A small child arrived on a stretcher, dead either on arrival or soon after. All the bodies appeared caked in dust from the rubble.
A Qaddafi spokesman said the destroyed home had housed 15 members of an extended family named al-Ghrari.
The home sat in a working-class neighborhood in the Souq al-Juma area, which is known as a hotbed of opposition to the Qaddafi government. As the journalists visited in early Sunday, and during another call later, a few neighbors tried without evidence to argue that the Qaddafi government had set off the blast or planted the bodies. But others who said that they opposed Colonel Qaddafi confirmed an airstrike.
There were no indications of any military facility in the area. Children's shoes, diapers, a woman's dress and kitchen tools lay amid the wreckage early Sunday. The blast knocked the top off the structure, leaving a concrete staircase reaching into the air. Several carports on the block collapsed, crushing the vehicles within. A neighbor a block away invited reporters into his home to show shattered glass from windows and doors, and said his wife had been taken to the hospital with wounds from the shards.
"Why did they bomb a civilian house?" asked Abdul Rouf, 26, another neighbor, who said he had run to his roof when he heard jets overhead and watched a missile hit the house.
Khalid Kaim, a deputy foreign minister, arrived at the scene not long after the blast and told journalists it gave the lie to NATO's stated mission of protecting civilians from Colonel Qaddafi's wrath for challenging his rule. "We have seen who is attacking civilians," he said. "They are targeting houses and flats. Tomorrow they will target schools and hospitals."
Perhaps wary of recent attacks by small groups of rebels against Qaddafi forces here, one of the government minders taking the journalists to the bombed house and the hospital in the middle of the night brought along his assault rifle.
[1] http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-A01D83F3-40B2E9E3/natolive/news_75639.htm