Libya insists talks under way with rebels

The Libyan government has dismissed rebel denials that the two sides have been holding talks and hit out at NATO\'s air war late, while Moamer Kadhafi has defiantly vowed that the alliance is doomed to defeat.

Addressing a news conference in Tripoli late on Friday, just hours after loud explosions again rocked the Libyan capital, Prime Minister Baghdadi al-Mahmudi accused NATO of committing "war crimes and crimes against humanity" by "directly targeting civilian sites" with air raids over the past three days.

State television aired Kadhafi\'s comments in what it said was a live telephone call from the Libyan leader, who has gone underground since the Western-led air war was launched in March, as thousands of his supporters gathered in Tripoli\'s Green Square for their biggest rally in weeks.

Baghdadi said that the governments of the countries where regime envoys had approached rebel representatives were fully aware that multiple contacts were under way as detailed by Russian envoy Mikhail Margelov.

"Ask the Egyptians, French, Norwegians and Tunisians for information. They will tell you the truth," Baghdadi said.

"We are sure of our meetings and everything has been recorded."

Speaking earlier on Friday a day after visiting Tripoli, Margelov said that the Libyan government had forged multiple contacts with the Libyan opposition in foreign capitals including Berlin, Paris and Oslo.

The comments from the Russian envoy, who visited the rebels\' eastern stronghold of Benghazi last week, drew a swift denial from their National Transitional Council.

"I can assure you there is and there was no negotiation between the NTC and the regime," the council\'s head of international affairs, Mahmud Jibril, said.

France said it had no knowledge of any negotiations.

"If there have been direct contacts, we\'re not involved and we didn\'t set them up," foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said.

In his speech, broadcast by loudspeaker to the flag-waving supporters in Green Square, Kadhafi said the government would not accept any reforms imposed from abroad.

"We are determined to change nothing in our country other than by our own free will... We are resisting, we are fighting," he said.

"NATO is bound to be defeated."

The Libyan prime minister denied allegations being investigated by prosecutors of the International Criminal Court that loyalist forces had been carrying out mass rapes as matter of deliberate policy.

"Neither our morals nor our religion permit it," Mahmudi said.

He called for "an urgent meeting" of the United Nations to examine "crimes committed by NATO against Libyan civilians," charging that the alliance had hit targets including a university and a hotel in Tripoli on Friday.

NATO said on Saturday that it had struck two military vehicle storage facilities in the capital and an armoured vehicle maintenance facility, three surface-to-air missile loaders and three anti-aircraft guns on its outskirts.

It said it had also hit five targets around the third-largest city Misrata and seven targets around the hilltown of Zintan, two rebel-held enclaves in western Libya that both saw fighting on Friday.

Kadhafi forces fired a volley of Grad rockets into Misrata killing 10 people and wounding 40, all of them civilians, rebel spokesman Ahmed Hassan told AFP.

The rebels meanwhile took complete control of the road between Zintan and Yafran, an AFP correspondent reported, adding that the highway through the Nafusa Mountains, southwest of Tripoli, was dotted with destroyed tanks and abandoned government vehicles.

In the United States, the New York Times reported that President Barack Obama overruled two senior government lawyers in deciding that he did not need Congressional approval to extend US participation in the Libya campaign, adding grist to a building political row over the conflict.

In reaching his conclusion Obama rejected the opinions of Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department\'s Office of Legal Counsel, The Times reported, citing unnamed officials familiar with the deliberations.

Johnson and Krass both told the White House they believed that US military activity in the NATO-led air war over Libya amounted to "hostilities" requiring Congressional authorisation.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner sent a scathing letter to the president earlier this month warning that US operations would be illegal from this Sunday because they lacked such approval.