Libya rebels claim 'most' of key town Zawiyah

ZAWIYAH, Libya (AFP) - Rebels said on Monday they have seized "most" of Zawiyah, the final hurdle on the road to Tripoli, as the UN chief's special envoy visited Tunis for talks on Libya's future and Moamer Kadhafi's interior minister flew out to Cairo.

"Basically most of the town is under the control of rebel fighters," rebel field commander Abdul Hamid Ismail told AFP of Zawiyah, a key port 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of the capital.

The rebels also claimed to have overrun the towns of Sorman, 60 kilometres west of Tripoli and Garyan, 50 kilometres to the south as they pushed an assault on three fronts in western Libya.

The claimed advances, which would put opposition forces in sight of Tripoli, came as Kadhafi railed against the rebels and NATO, amid rumours he was preparing to flee the country.

They also came as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's envoy Abdul Ilah al-Khatib flew to Tunis, saying he would join talks between rebels and the Kadhafi regime, an AFP photographer saw.

The Jordanian former foreign minister said negotiations on Libya's future would take place in a hotel in the Tunis suburbs.

Khatib has spent months shuttling between Tripoli and the rebel base at Benghazi trying to start ceasefire talks between the embattled regime and the rebels' National Transitional Council.

Earlier, sources close to Tunisian security services said representatives of the two warring sides had met in Djerba, near the Tunisian-Libyan border.

Negotiations were under way with "several other foreign parties," the national TAP news agency said, without giving details of the content of the talks.

A South African jet and two Qatari military helicopters were on the tarmac at the airport in Djerba, a south Tunisian island near the border with Libya, an airport source told AFP.

Kadhafi's Interior Minister Mabruk Abdallah flew from Djerba to Egypt on Monday on a private plane with nine members of his family, a Cairo airport official told AFP.

It was not immediately clear whether it was a defection.

Dozens of high-ranking officials have turned their back on Kadhafi, including former interior and justice ministers as well as Libya's ambassador to the Cairo-based Arab league since the revolt erupted exactly six months ago.

Overnight, Kadhafi predicted a swift end for "the rats" and the "coloniser" -- the rebels and NATO -- in an audio message on Libyan television, extracts of which were published by official news agency JANA.

"The end of the coloniser is close and the end of the rats is close. They (the rebels) flee from one house to another before the masses who are chasing them," Kadhafi declared.

"The coloniser and its agents can now only resort to lies and psychological warfare after all the wars with all the weapons have failed," Kadhafi said amid rumours on Twitter and other media about his imminent departure into exile.

The veteran leader called on his supporters to "prepare for the battle to liberate" rebel-held towns.

Rebels had on Saturday entered Zawiyah, making swift advances, but became bogged down on Sunday when they suffered heavy casualties amid heavy shelling.

Ismail said battles for Zawiyah had raged through the night Sunday into Monday morning, with five rebels killed, and that Kadhafi's forces had been pushed to the eastern outskirts.

By the afternoon the fighting had died down and an AFP correspondent in Zawiyah reported occasional shelling.

Rebels on Monday also battled loyalist forces around oil installations in the key eastern town of Brega, an AFP reporter saw.

Rows of seaside apartment blocks that once housed the workforce of the strategic oil hub in eastern Brega were under total rebel control.

Government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim, meanwhile, said the regime's armed forces were capable of retaking rebel-held towns and districts.

"Our mujahedeen forces are capable of exterminating these gangs," he told a news conference in Tripoli.

Ibrahim acknowledged "problems" in Sorman, 60 kilometres west of Tripoli, but "hundreds of volunteers" backed by the army were "handling the case," he said.

He admitted that the rebels had entered Garyan in the Nefusa mountains "in order to spread terror... but there is no need for concern" since government troops would retake the town "in the next few hours."

Abdulsalam Othman, spokesman for the rebels' western military council, said on Monday that both Garyan and Sorman were in rebel hands, as was the 15-kilometre (nine-mile) stretch of road linking Sorman to Zawiyah.

He said the advances meant that Tripoli's supply lines from Tunisia are severed.

The advance on Sorman started at dawn on Sunday, Othman told AFP in Zawiyah.

After more than 10 hours of intense battle, the rebels managed to force Kadhafi's troops to retreat. During the fight, more than 40 fighters, some of them sub-Saharan African mercenaries, were captured.

South of the rebel town of Misrata, 200 kilometres east of the capital, the rebels had consolidated their positions in Tuarga after taking control of it on Friday and where they said they faced only some pockets of resistance.

But Ibrahim said pro-Kadhafi forces had "retaken control of the town and killed most of those from the Misrata-based gangs who advanced on Tuarga."

Neither claim could be independently verified immediately.