By Ahmed Elumami,
Tripoli, 8 May 2013:
It has emerged that militiamen tried to intimidate Prime Minister Ali Zeidan when he met and . . .[restrict]negotiated with them. He said today that they had brandished a grenade and a gun at him. He did not say when this happened.
”The rebels unlocked the grenade in front of me but no one was hurt because the grenade did not explode and it was taken quickly outside the Prime Ministry headquarters,” he stated today at a press conference.
He said that they also had put a gun on the table in front of him saying that they could easily use force against him.
Rejecting the use of it against the protesters, he said the sole exception would be if any Libyan was hurt by them.
On Tuesday, the gunmen handed leaflets in front of the Foreign Ministry demanding he resign because he had worked as diplomat during Qaddafi’s regime. In fact, the Political isolation Law does not requires all Qaddafi-era diplomats to be removed, only ambassadors. Zeidan was not an ambassador.
Responding to their call, he said that he would remain as in office until he was asked by the Congress to go. Being Prime Minister was not easy, he said, but what was going on in Libya “requires me to stay in my job to maintain stability as much as possible”.
The government, he said, wanted dialogue with the all the revolutionaries. The problem was, he believed, that large segments of Libyan society, including the thuwar, lacked a culture of dialogue. That had been shown by recent events. [/restrict]
