An airstrike late on Tuesday hit a detention centre for mainly African migrants in a suburb of the Libyan capital of Tripoli, killing at least 44 people and wounding 80, a health official said.
It is the highest publicly reported toll of an airstrike or shelling since eastern forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar three months ago launched an offensive with ground troops and aircraft to take the capital held by the internationally recognised government.
The conflict is part of chaos that has taken place in Libya since the NATO-backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Malek Mersek, spokesman for a state emergency medical services, said 40 people had been killed and 80 wounded in the strike on the detention centre in the Tajoura suburb located next to a military camp.
The Tripoli-based government said in a statement that dozens of people had been killed and wounded in an airstrike blamed on the “war criminal Khalifa Haftar”.
Published photos showed African migrants undergoing surgery in a hospital after the strike. Others lay on beds, some covered in dust or with limbs bandaged.
Thousands of migrants are held in government-run detention centres in western Libya in what human rights groups and the United Nations say are often inhuman conditions.
Tajoura, east of Tripoli’s centre, is home to several military camps of forces allied to Libya’s internationally recognised government, which have been targeted by airstrikes for weeks.
On Monday, Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), which is allied to a parallel government, said it would start heavy airstrikes on targets in Tripoli after “traditional means” of war had been exhausted.
An LNA official denied his force had hit the detention centre, saying militias allied to Tripoli had shelled it after a precision airstrike by the LNA on a camp.
The LNA air campaign has failed to take Tripoli in three months of fighting, and last week LNA lost its main forward base in Gharyan, which was taken back by Tripoli forces last week.
The conflict threatens to allow Islamist militants to fill a security void, disrupt oil supplies, boost migration across the Mediterranean to Europe, and scupper U.N. plans for an election to end rivalries between parallel administrations in east and west.
