Gaddafi regime fails to fool media over injured child

Journalists taken to see 'bomb victim' in Libyan hospital find out child was hurt in road accident
Tripoli hospital
A Libyan official points at the injured seven-month-old girl while telling the media on a visit to a Tripoli hospital that she was injured by a Nato air strike. Photograph: Ivan Sekretarev/AP

The Libyan government's attempts to show how Nato bombing is harming civilians backfired when a hospital worker revealed that a seven-month-old "air strike victim" had been injured in a car crash.

Foreign journalists in Tripoli were taken by bus to a hospital on Sunday night to see the seven-month-old girl, Nasib, who lay unconscious. Media handlers claimed she had been hurt when a bomb exploded in a field near her house on the eastern edge of the capital a few hours earlier.

But a member of the medical staff slipped a note written in English on hospital stationery to a reporter, which was seen by Reuters, that said: "This is a case of road traffic accident. This is the truth."

Journalists' suspicions had already been raised during an earlier visit to the bombsite in the suburb of Tajura where the girl was said to have been injured.

Talking to journalists, Mohamed Elounsi, the son of the owner of the field, described how a black and white dog and a dozen or so chickens and pigeons had been killed in the evening strike, but said nobody had been injured.

Elounsi said: "I lost my birds, one dog and my cows nearly died." Shockwaves from the blast destroyed a room in one house and shattered numerous windows, he said. "My message to Obama is, 'Why do you send this [bomb] to my father's farm.'"

Residents gathered around the crater, measuring two metres by one metre, chanting pro-Muammar Gaddafi slogans. Initially, none of them mentioned any civilian casualties and there seemed little real anger. It was only shortly before the bus departed that one neighbour said his four-year-daughter suffered cuts when a glass door shattered.

At the hospital, Gaddafi's aides directed the media to Nasib, whose bandaged foot was hooked up to medical equipment. A man introduced as her uncle said she had been injured in the Tajura missile strike.

A second man, presented as a neighbour and a member of the health ministry, ranted against Nato and shouted "God, Muammar, Libya, and that's all".

This man, who gave his name as Emad, was mysteriously present once more when journalists were taken to another suburb at 1am on Monday. This time, a "bomb" had landed in a back garden at about midnight "while the family were having lunch", according to a man presented as a spokesman for the family.

The two metre-long bomb had fallen from the sky, he said, implying it came from a Nato jet. It had not exploded, however, and appeared less like an example of cutting-edge warfare than a remnant of the cold war. Closer inspection showed there was Russian writing on the bomb.

That fact was put to Emad, who had since admitted he was a member of Gaddafi's media team, while still insisting he was also a neighbour of the seven-month-old girl. Emad's story of the midnight bomb suddenly changed: Nato must have struck a nearby military compound, triggering an explosion that caused this missile – a piece of Gaddafi's own arsenal – to shoot off into a nearby garden.

On Monday, during a visit to complex of state buildings that were bombed overnight, deputy foreign minister Khaled Kaim denied that the regime was deliberately trying to mislead the media.

"We want to be as credible as much as possible. If there was a mistake it was not from the government."

He suggested that civilians angered by Nato's campaign might have been to blame.

The government says that 700 civilians have died in bombing raids, but have offered little evidence to support the claim. The majority of the airstrikes in Tripoli appear to have been so precise that life in the city has carried on largely as normal, with people out on the streets well into the night, when most of the bombing takes place.

Kaim's comments were the first by a senior government official on any topic since last Wednesday. He strongly criticised the bombing of the government buildings, which included the offices of the foreign affairs parliamentary committee and the attorney general, saying they had no link to the military.

He also said that Gaddafi, who has not appeared in public or on television for a week, was in "very good" health, and in direct contact with the government.

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