BENGHAZI, Libya (AFP) – Libya's Moamer Kadhafi vowed Friday to defeat NATO as his forces launched a deadly rocket assault on rebel-held Misrata but lost a key stretch of road towards Tunisia's border.
Mahmud Jibril of the opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) meanwhile denied suggestions by a Russian envoy that the rebel leadership had been negotiating with his regime.
State television aired Kadhafi's comments in what it said was a live telephone call from the Libyan leader, who has gone underground since Western nations began waging an air war in March to protect civilians from a bloody protest crackdown.
"They will be defeated, NATO is bound to be defeated," Kadhafi said in the speech broadcast on loudspeakers in Tripoli's Green Square as thousands of flag-waving regime supporters staged their biggest rally for weeks.
"We are determined to change nothing in our country other than by our own free will, not because of the alliance's planes... We are resisting, we are fighting," he declared.
"If they come to the ground, we will wait for them, but they are cowards, they will not dare," he said in reference to NATO's insistance it will not deploy ground troops on Libyan soil in line with a UN resolution.
Kadhafi called on Libyans to prepare to liberate their country: "Get ready men and women to free Libya inch by inch."
His speech came hours after loud explosions shook Tripoli, where Kadhafi has his residence, as NATO warplanes constantly overflew the Libyan capital, an AFP reporter said.
In rebels' western enclave of Misrata, Kadhafi loyalists killed 10 people and wounded 40 when they pounded the lifeline port city with a volley of Grad rockets, rebel spokesman Ahmed Hassan told AFP.
All the victims were civilians, he said, and were hit when rockets slammed into the western and eastern gates of the city. The body of one of the dead, a woman, was found in the rubble of her house.
Hassan said Misrata was still the target of near daily bombardment by Kadhafi loyalists, and that there had been no air strikes by the NATO-led coalition on the embattled strongman's forces on Friday.
Elsewhere, a road linking the towns of Zintan and Yafran was under the complete control of the insurgents and dotted with destroyed tanks and abandoned government vehicles, an AFP correspondent said.
The road, a key sector of the route to the border with Tunisia, was seized two days after the rebels overran the nearby villages of Ghanymma, Lawania and Zawit Bagoul.
In the Italian city of Naples, where NATO's Libya operation is headquartered, Jibril, the head of international affairs in the NTC, dismissed reports the opposition was in negotiations with the Kadhafi regime.
"I can assure you there is and there was no negotiation between the NTC and the regime," said Jibril.
At a joint news conference with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, Jibril said that were negotiations to take place, the NTC would "announce it out of commitment to our friends all over the world".
Russian envoy Mikhail Margelov said Friday that Kadhafi representatives had made contact with the rebels in European capitals including Berlin, Paris and Oslo.
Margelov had said on a one day visit to Tripoli on Thursday that the contacts had only taken place in Paris, although he did not disclose the nature of the supposed negotiations.
France said it had no knowledge of the negotiations.
"If there have been direct contacts, we're not involved and we didn't set them up," foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said.
Mahmudi said on Thursday Kadhafi's departure was a "red line" that cannot be crossed, despite growing international calls for him to quit and the armed insurrection against his 41-year rule.
An NTC official in the opposition stronghold Benghazi in eastern Libya told AFP on Friday that their position was unchanged.
"Kadhafi must go. Anyone from the rebel side who negotiates his staying in power would immediately have an NTC arrest warrant issued against him," the official said, on condition of anonymity.
And NATO on Friday slammed as "cynical" an offer in an Italian newspaper interview by Moamer Kadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam, that the regime in Tripoli was ready to organise internationally supervised elections.
"Once again, it is an instance of what I would call a cynical PR ploy," said alliance spokeswoman Oana Lungescu during a news briefing on the military campaign.
"It is hard to imagine that after 41 years in which Kadhafi abolished elections, the constitution, political parties, trade unions... (that) overnight a dictator would turn into a democrat."
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