At least 16 people have been killed and 52 others were injured in fighting between armed groups in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, a spokesman for the city’s emergency services said on Saturday.
It was the latest escalation to threaten the relative peace after nearly a decade of civil war in Libya, where two rival sets of authorities are locked in a political stalemate. The pisions have sparked several incidents of violence in Tripoli in recent months.
The fighting "killed 16 people, among them three civilians including a child aged 11, and wounded 52," the ambulance service said in a statement.
The United Nations Libya mission UNSMIL said it had received reports of civilian casualties and demanded an investigation.
"Any action that endangers the lives of civilians is unacceptable," it said in a tweet, calling on "all Libyans to do everything possible to preserve the country's fragile stability at this sensitive time".
The clashes occurred between two armed groups with major clout in the west of the war-torn country: the Al-Radaa force and the Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade.
Another brigade called "444" intervened to mediate a truce, deploying its armed vehicles in a buffer zone east of Tripoli, noted an AFP photographer.
According to Osama Ali, a spokesman for Libya’s Ambulance and Emergency Services, around 60 students who were stranded in the dormitories of the University of Tripoli due to the conflict were transported by ambulances.
Flights of Libyan Airlines from Cairo and Al Alamiya (Global Air) from Benghazi, which were supposed to land at Mitiga Airport, were perted to Misrata, 200 kilometers east of Tripoli.
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