BENGHAZI: Gunmen attacked the Benghazi studios of two privately run television channels overnight, journalists and security officials said yesterday, as violence in Libya’s second city showed no let-up.
The television channels targeted were the Doha-based Libya Al Ahrar, whose chairman Mahmud Shammam served as information minister in the first post-Gaddafi government, and the Cairo-based Libya Al Oula.
“Armed men threw a Molotov cocktail at the channel’s offices, torched an outside broadcast vehicle and fired a hail of bullets at the studio,” said Libya Al Ahrar journalist Khadija Al Ammami, who survived an assassination attempt last August.
Gunmen also broke into the studios of Libya Al Oula and vandalised them, a security official said.
Also in Benghazi, a Libyan political activist was critically wounded when a bomb exploded under his car as he drove through the city yesterday, security sources and his relatives said.
No-one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Abdullah Gharyani, a member of a campaign group calling for early elections to replace an interim parliament it accuses of failing to stabilise Libya.
Gharyani “was driving his car when it was blown up in the area of Al Kiesh. He was seriously injured and now he is undergoing surgery to save his life,” an official at Benghazi Medical Centre said.
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