Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter Aisha, who fled to Algeria with other family members on Monday, has given birth to a daughter, an Algerian government official announced yesterday.
“Aisha gave birth very early this morning. She had a little girl. Mother and daughter are doing fine,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Algerian authorities earlier said that Aisha, her brothers Hannibal and Mohammed, and her mother Safiya, were allowed into the country on purely “humanitarian grounds.”
“The wife of Muammar Gaddafi, Safiya, his daughter Aisha, and sons Hannibal and Mohammed, accompanied by their children, entered Algeria at 8:45 am
(0745 GMT) through the Algeria-Libyan border,” the foreign ministry said in a statement carried by the state APS news agency, giving no information on the whereabouts of Gaddafi himself.
Libyan rebels are seeking the handover of Gaddafi’s wife and three children and have criticised Algeria, which has not recognised the rebel National Transition Council, for taking in the family.
Libya’s interim leader yesterday gave forces loyal to deposed ruler Muammar Gaddafi a four-day deadline to surrender towns still under their control or face military force.
Since the rebel’s tookover Tripoli, evidence has been mounting that Muammar Gaddafi may have lied about the death of his adopted baby daughter, Hana in a 1986 American airstrike.
The strike hit Gaddafi’s home in his Tripoli compound, Bab al-Aziziya, in retaliation for the Libyan-sponsored bombing of a Berlin nightclub earlier that same year that killed two United States servicemen.
A rebel official said yesterday that attacks by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces on engineers deep in the Libyan Desert caused the massive water shortage that has left the capital without running water for a week.
Regime forces fired on repair crews a week ago as they tried to restart pumps bringing water from deep aquifers some 700 kilometres (450 miles) south of Tripoli, the official, Aref Ali Nayeb, told the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, Libyan rebels have vowed to get Gaddafi soon.
A spokesman said yesterday, that the rebels have a “good idea” where Muammar Gaddafi is and are confident they’ll catch him.
Ali Tarhouni, a minister in the National Transitional Council, told reporters that, “we have a good idea where he is. We don’t have any doubt that we will catch him.”
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