UN envoy says Libya truce nearly broke down amid fighting

The U.N. envoy for Libya on Feb. 28 denounced the near breakdown of a fragile truce between the country's warring sides, citing a "serious violation" over the last 24 hours attacks on the capital including an early morning shelling of Tripoli's airport.

Ghassan Salame, hosting diplomatic talks in Geneva, also exposed a rift within delegations representing Libya's internationally recognized government in Tripoli and the eastern-based government allied with ex-general Khalifa Haftar.

Salame has been mediating three-tiered talks on economic, political and military tracks since an agreement to launch them last month, hoping to end violence and troubles in Libya since the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

"The country, in the past 24 hours, has witnessed a very serious violation of the truce," Salame told reporters after political talks at United Nations offices. "In fact, it could have been almost the breakdown of that truce."

Salame said "many areas" of the capital were shelled. "It is clear that neither one of the three tracks can move positively, when the cannon is doing what it is doing right now."

In April, Haftar's forces, which control much of the east, launched an offensive to wrest control of the capital from the U.N.-backed government. The march on Tripoli resulted in a military stalemate and hundreds of civilian casualties.

Earlier on Feb. 28, a senior health official in the Tripoli-based government told The Associated Press that Haftar's forces had shelled the capital with at least 40 rockets since dawn.

Some rockets hit Mitiga airport, sparking a fire that forced authorities to close the city's only functioning airport, said Amin al-Hashemi, the Health Ministry spokesman. He said the shelling brought down...