Col Muammar Gaddafi is moving around Tripoli in a network of secret tunnels and bunkers as Nato dramatically ramps up its efforts to kill the Libyan dictator.
Colonel Gaddafi meets tribal leaders
By Andrew Gilligan, Tripoli 8:00PM BST 13 May 2011
Analysis of "key targets" bombed by the alliance shows that there has been a significant switch in recent days from assisting the rebels to bombing "command and control" and other targets in Tripoli.
Franco Frattini, Italy's foreign minister, however, said he had information that Gaddafi had been injured in a Nato strike. Mr Frattini said Giovanni Martinelli, the Roman Catholic bishop in Tripoli, said Gaddafi had left Tripoli after he was injured in an airstrikes.
"I tend to give credence to the comment of the bishop of Tripoli, Monsignor Martinelli, who has been in close contact over recent weeks, when he told us that Gaddafi is very probably outside Tripoli and is probably also wounded. We don't know where or how," Frattini said.
But a Libyan spokesman dismissed the report. "It's nonsense," Mussa Ibrahim said. "The leader is in high morale. He's in good spirits. He is leading the country day by day. He hasn't been harmed at all."
In the first three days of this week, according to Nato figures, alliance jets struck 24 "key targets" in and around Tripoli, compared with just eight in the whole of the previous week.
Targets since Monday have included seven "command and control" facilities in Tripoli, compared with just three over the previous ten days.
On Thursday morning, hours after Gaddafi appeared on state TV for the first time in twelve days, Nato struck his heavily-fortified Tripoli leadership compound, Bab al-Aziziya.
"Nobody can be in any doubt, whatever their denials, that Nato is trying to kill Gaddafi," said one senior regime official. "This is illegal under international law and the terms of the UN resolution." In a sign of Gaddafi's extreme nervousness about being targeted by Nato forces, his TV appearance was filmed in a ground-floor room at Tripoli's Rixos hotel, where around 50 foreign journalists are staying.
The dictator did not use the hotel's entrance and was not seen in its corridors or lobbies, which were full of reporters at the time. Staff at the Rixos said there was a underground tunnel from the hotel to Bab al-Aziziya, which is about half a mile away on an adjacent plot of land. An unmarked door opposite the conference room Gaddafi used led to a staircase to the basement and in turn, through white-tiled corridors, to a sealed metal door from which the handle had been removed.
At the rear of the hotel, there is also a ramp capable of taking large vehicles which descends into the earth. Security guards on permanent duty nearby prevented The Daily Telegraph from walking down the ramp.
On a rare visit to Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound, which is sealed off from the city by four rings of 15-feet blast walls, journalists were shown a bomb crater in what was clearly the roof of a bunker. A black void was visible below, as well as the remains of a reinforced concrete structure. A government spokesman insisted it was a sewage facility, but even other officials later admitted this was untrue.
The layout of the underground tunnels is known to Nato since most were built by Western companies.
Similar tunnels were discovered last month beneath Gaddafi's summer palace in the rebel-controlled city of al-Bayda, with bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and even a sauna 30 feet beneath the ground.
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