Libyan lawmakers meet in secret after raid of parliament

CAIRO – Libyan lawmakers met in hiding Tuesday, two days after forces loyal to a renegade ex-general stormed the parliament building and demanded that the Islamist-dominated body disband.

One-time general Khalifa Haftar’s offensive against Islamists and their allied militias, launched last week in the eastern city of Benghazi, threatened to escalate into the worst fighting Libya has seen in the three years since an uprising ousted and killed dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

It also posed a stark challenge to the weak central government, which has flailed in its attempts to establish order.

In a conciliatory gesture, the country’s elections commission called for new elections on June 25, the official news agency LANA reported. It was not immediately clear whether lawmakers, whose mandate has already expired, would attempt to oppose that plan.

Haftar defended his actions in an interview published Tuesday in the London-based pan-Arabic newspaper Asharq al Awsat, saying the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the biggest parliamentary blocs, was a “malignancy” that must be eradicated.

The Brotherhood issued a statement denouncing his actions but also urging political accommodation.

The former general broke with Gadhafi in the 1990s and went into exile in the suburbs of Washington before returning home to fight in the 2011 rebellion. He has decried the Islamists who came to political prominence after Gadhafi’s fall and are backed, like almost all Libyan political factions, by armed militias.

Haftar had been planning the offensive for two years, he told the newspaper.

For his move against the Islamists, the former general garnered the support of some army units, including an elite force that threw in with him Monday and an Interior Ministry unit that declared its allegiance Tuesday.

In the interview, Haftar insisted that the offensive was not a power grab – but he also said he would be willing to serve as president if that was “the will of the people.”

The outbreak of chaos in Libya is causing diplomats and foreign businesses to reconsider their presence in the energy-rich North African nation. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Algeria are shutting down their missions in the capital, and a major Algerian oil concern, Sonatrach, has withdrawn its employees.