Pro-Gadhafi forces slow down opponents

TRIPOLI, Libya – After dramatic successes over the past weeks, Libya’s rebel movement appears to have hit a wall of overwhelming power from loyalists of Moammar Gadhafi. Pro-regime forces halted their drive on Tripoli with a heavy barrage of rockets in the east and threatened Tuesday to recapture the closest rebel-held city to the capital in the west.

If Zawiya, on Tripoli’s doorstep, is ultimately retaken, the contours of a stalemate would emerge – with Libya divided between a largely loyalist west and a rebel east as the world wrestles with the thorny question of how deeply to intervene.

A spokesman for the opposition’s newly created Interim Governing Council in Benghazi, meanwhile, said a man who claimed to represent Gadhafi made contact with the council to discuss terms for the leader of four decades to step down.

Libyan state television denied that Gadhafi had sent an envoy to talk to the rebels.

Later Tuesday, Gadhafi made a surprise appearance at a hotel hosting foreign correspondents in Tripoli, arriving just before midnight. He raised his fist in the air as he walked from his car to the hotel, then he went into a room separated by curtains for exclusive interviews with a Turkish and a French television station.