Islamist gunmen driving a car bomb blasted their way past security at the Libyan capital’s smartest five-star hotel on Tuesday morning, storming into the lobby and shooting dead at least eight people in a bloody melee that lasted hours.
“Where are the infidels?” screamed one of the gunmen in the lobby of central Tripoli’s Maltese-owned Corinthia Hotel, according to an account provided to local media by a witness. All the assailants, believed to number three or four, were said to have been killed or captured, some reportedly in a suicide bombing on the hotel’s top floor, local and international media reported.
Video footage taken from nearby buildings showed fire and black smoke rising from the driveway in front of the hulking glass and steel tower, a Tripoli landmark adjacent to the city’s old city. TV station Al Jazeera and others reported that security forces managed to lead at least seven US nationals staying at the hotel to safety.
EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini described the attack as “another reprehensible act of terrorism which deals a blow to efforts to bring peace and stability to Libya”.
At least four of the dead were reportedly foreigners, their nationalities still unknown, and the rest were Libyans, local media reported. The attack on the hotel — a well-guarded edifice that draws diplomats, politicians and the wealthy for its $60 lunch buffets and $8 coffees — underscored Libya’s faltering security and the spread of jihadi terrorism from eastern cities of the vast, oil-rich north African country.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the al-Qaeda offshoot known as Isis or Isil, quickly claimed responsibility for the attack on social media, though its assertion could not be verified. The group had also claimed a January 17 attack on the capital’s Algerian embassy and says it is holding two Tunisian journalists it captured last year.
Libya is divided into two camps of political and armed groups loyal to separate governments vying for international legitimacy, territory and the country’s oil wealth.
The internationally recognised government in the east, backed by the armed forces of Gen Khalifa Haftar and his Egyptian and United Arab Emirates allies, is based in the eastern city of Tubruq. The Islamist-leaning self-declared authority in the capital, backed by militias from the city of Misurata, has struggled for international backing.
The self-declared prime minister of the authority in Tripoli, the Islamist-backed premier Omar Hassi, was said to have been staying at the hotel. His loyalists quickly described the attack as an assassination attempt on Mr Hassi by Gen Haftar, giving no evidence, even as jihadi social media sites began posting the names and pictures of the assailants and hailing the attack.
One, a clean-shaven Tunisian identified as Abu Ibrahim al-Tunisi al-Anghamasi, could be seen in hotel surveillance video of the attack.
Mr Hassi and his allies have courted controversy by openly allying with some jihadi groups in their eight-month battle against Gen Haftar’s forces. Last year, the jihadi Libyan Revolutionaries Operation Room, a militia now allied with the Tripoli authorities, stormed the Corinthia and briefly abducted then-prime minister Ali Zeidan in a debacle that foreshadowed the current rift between the Islamist-leaning Misurata-backed camp and their liberal-leaning opponents.
Bernardino Leon, the UN’s special envoy to Libya, is overseeing peace talks in Geneva. The UN issued a statement citing dialogue participants as condemning the attack and warning of terrorists “taking advantage of the security chaos to consolidate their presence” in the country.
“A united, stable and consensual Libya will be able to defeat terrorism and violence,” the statement said.
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