Thousands flee Libya on ferries

Two ferries evacuating some 4,500 Chinese nationals from Libya are heading for the island of Crete, authorities say.

The evacuees on the Greek-flagged vessels are due to leave the Greek island later on specially chartered flights.

Greece says it will assist the evacuation of up to 15,000 Chinese in total.

The Foreign Ministry says three military transport planes also left today for the Libyan capital Tripoli and south-western city of Sabha to bring some 300 Greek and Cypriot nationals to Athens.

Rough seas prevented a ferry carrying hundreds of Americans from fleeing Libya for the island of Malta.

The safety of US citizens was a prime concern after failed attempts earlier this week to get them out by plane.

But bad weather made it impossible for a 600-passenger ferry, with many Americans on board since Wednesday, to sail today.

Strong winds have been whipping up high waves in the Mediterranean and the catamaran, Maria Dolores, was not likely to leave Tripoli’s As-shahab port until Friday at the earliest, ferry officials said.

“Citizens are safe on board. It will leave when the weather permits,” US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in an earlier tweet.

A spokesman for the American Embassy said provisions are aboard the ferry, one of two in Libya now with a total capacity for evacuating more than 1,000 people.

Turkey managed to evacuate more than 7,000 of its 25,000 citizens in Libya, mostly by two ships that arrived today, and it said it would also evacuate foreigners from Libya, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said.

Some of 3,000 terrified Turks and dozens of foreigners who escaped the chaos of Libya on two Turkish ships said on their arrival in the Mediterranean Turkish port of Marmaris that they have seen bodies hanging from electricity poles and militias driving vans full of bodies and witnessed looting.

Ali Tumkaya, the human resources manager for Turkey’s Sembol company, which was building a university in Benghazi, said militias came to raid the Benghazi airport and brought vans with more than 20 dead bodies, who Tumkaya said were paid soldiers from sub-Saharan Africa.

Another Turkish evacuee, Serdar Taskin, said he saw bodies hanging from electricity poles. But he did not know if they were protesters or Gaddafi supporters.

The difficulty in obtaining landing permits for charter flights from Libyan aviation authorities and other operational and safety problems for scheduled flights forced some carriers to halt their operations.

Austrian Airlines temporarily cancelled its flights to and from Tripoli until Sunday.

But a plane carrying 125 Ukrainians and 38 foreign nationals evacuated from Libya landed at Kiev’s Boryspil airport early today.