The Gaddafi regime's propaganda attempts have been cruelly exposed after a girl said to have been injured in a Nato bombing raid was revealed by hospital staff to have been injured in a road traffic accident.
A member of staff passed a Reuters journalist a note saying, in English: 'This is a case of road traffic accident. This is the truth.' Photo: AP
By Richard Spencer, Tripoli
8:11PM BST 06 Jun 2011
Reporters were taken to see a string of damaged buildings around the Libyan capital Tripoli, in an attempt by officials to show evidence of civilian casualties.
After seeing a few broken windows in a church, and some dead chickens and a dead dog at a farm, they were then taken to a hospital to see a girl who officials said had been injured in the air strike.
But a member of staff passed a Reuters journalist a note saying, in English: "This is a case of road traffic accident. This is the truth."
Ever since the start of the Nato bombing campaign in March, officials have claimed a high level of casualties but have often been stymied in their attempts to prove it. On one occasion in the early days of the campaign, a large number of graves dug for a funeral were left empty when the bodies failed to arrive.
On another occasion, the driver of a bus taking reporters to the site of a residential neighbourhood allegedly hit by a bomb said he was unable to find it and returned to the journalists' hotel.
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Sunday's series of trips started with a visit to Saint Mark's Coptic Church, where some windows were broken. But also visible was a neighbouring military compound, devastated by a strike of apparently pinpoint accuracy.
The late afternoon trip to the farm and the hospital featured a man who claimed to be a neighbour confirming the injury, and the baby girl's mother.
It was as she arrived that the hospital official surreptitiously dropped the note under the reporters' feet.
Confusingly the same "neighbour" was present when the day ended at 1.30am on Monday morning, in a garden in a different part of the city said to have been hit shortly beforehand. The home-owner said he had been eating in the garden when the "missile" landed, terrifying his children.
On closer inspection, the "missile", sitting next to a small hole in the ground and between palm trees, turned out to be the empty fuel tank of a Russian-made missile, as revealed by its Cyrillic writing.
Since Russia is not part of the Nato mission, even accompanying officials said it was unlikely to have come from an overflying jet.
The "neighbour", who now said he was also a government official, claimed Nato had hit a weapons storage base, sending parts flying through the air.
The Libyan war sometimes feels as if it is being fought in three parallel dimensions – the actual war on the ground, the fantasies of Libyan government officials, and on the remote hi-tech computer screens of Nato powers' weapons systems.
Gaddafi loyalists say the country is under control apart from a handful of criminals and al-Qaeda terrorists. They claim Nato bombing has killed 718 civilians and injured 4,067. They have given no figures for military deaths.
Some of the more grandiose claims by Nato spokesmen have also been challenged, including a statement that watchtowers around the Gaddafi leadership compound had been surgically destroyed when they were clearly still standing.
On the ground the war is being fought on three fronts, near the oil refinery town of Brega in the east, around the city of Misurata in central Libya, and in the Nafusa mountains to Tripoli's south-west. The rebels are generally held to be making slow progress.
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