“The situation in Tripoli is complicated” but “we are very calm,” the director of the International Department of the Chamber of Tarragona, Roberto Barros, told Efe from the Libyan capital, which together with eight companions have been trapped by the recent armed clashes.
“We are very good, we are never the objective of militias,” Barros said about the situation of the commercial delegation from the hotel where they wait to be evacuated when flights from Tripoli are restarted.
On Monday, when the violent escalation began, “we were in a restaurant and decided to go to the hotel. The next day we continued meeting but at night there was enough mess and they took us to the basements,” Barros said.
There were hardly an hour in the basement, he says, after the outbreak caught off guard to this commercial delegation that landed in Libya on Sunday and planned to finish his mission tomorrow, after “highly satisfactory” meetings.
“The situation in Tripoli is complicated, but it is an internal issue of them, the system of government and all militias is very complex and when there are disagreements and an incidence,” this happens, contextualizes.
The delegation continues at the Hotel de la Capital waiting for flights to be reactivated from Tripoli and with the assistance of the Embassy of Spain in the Maghreb country.
The security alert, after two days of clashes, led Tripoli’s educational centers to suspend classes for Wednesday and several airlines diverted their flights to Mitiga airport.
Tripoli lives since Monday a burst of violence that has left at least twelve dead in the capital, in armed clashes that triggered the death of the powerful leader Abdel Ghani al Kikli, leader of the militia apparatus for stability support (SSA).
The Government of National Unity of Libya (GUN), which controls this western region, announced on Wednesday a high fire to restore calm in the capital, in the worst escalation of violence that Tripoli lived in more than a year.
The European Union later expressed “its firm support to the recent announcement of a truce and the consequent distension in Tripoli”, while expressing its “deep concern” about civil victims and the important destruction of infrastructure.
“The EU strongly demands that those responsible pay accounts,” he demanded.
He also requested as “imperative that the truce be maintained and that all the parties involved establish, without delay, a genuine dialogue to solve all pending disputes in a peaceful and constructive way.”
