Libyan security forces killed 35 people in the eastern city of Benghazi late on Friday, Human Rights Watch cited witnesses and hospital sources as saying, in the worst unrest of Muammar Qaddafi's four decades in power.
Protests against Qaddafi's rule this week, inspired by uprisings in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, were met with a fierce crackdown, but restrictions on media have made it difficult to establish the full extent of the violence.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said the killings on Friday took its estimate for the death toll over three days of protests to 84–most of it focused in the restive region around Benghazi, 1000km east of Tripoli.
It said the deaths in the city on Friday happened when security forces opened fire on people protesting after funeral processions for people killed in earlier violence. There has been no official word on the number of dead.
"We put out a call to all the doctors in Benghazzi to come to the hospital and for everyone to give blood because I've never seen anything like this before," the group quoted a senior hospital official in Benghazi as saying.
"Special forces who have a very strong allegiance to Qaddafi are still fighting desperately gain to control, to gain ground and the people are fighting them street by street," said a resident of Benghazi identified as Mohammed by the BBC.
The broadcaster said residents in Benghazi reported there was no electricity in parts of the city and that tanks were stationed outside the court building.
While the level of unrest has not previously been seen before in the oil exporter, Libya-watchers say the situation is different from Egypt, because Qaddafi has oil cash to smooth over social problems. Qaddafi is also respected in much of the country, though less so in the Cyrenaica region around Benghazi.
"For sure there is no national uprising," said Noman Benotman, a former opposition Libyan Islamist who is based in Britain but is currently in Tripoli.
"I don't think Libya is comparable to Egypt or Tunisia. Qaddafi would fight to the very last moment," he said by telephone from the Libyan capital.
The BBC said one Benghazi protester said some soldiers had switched sides and that people clambered unopposed onto three tanks.
"The soldiers say we are citizens of this country and we cannot fight our citizens," he said.
Tight government control and media restrictions have limited the amount of information emerging about the unrest.
Qatar-based news channel Al Jazeera said its signal was being jammed on several frequencies and its website had been blocked in Libya.
The privately owned Quryna newspaper said that in Benghazi thousands of residents had gathered on Friday for the funeral processions of 14 protesters killed in clashes there. Thousands more had demonstrated in front of Benghazi court building.
Opposition activists said protesters fought troops for control of the nearby town of al-Bayda, scene of some of the worst violence over the past two days, where townspeople said they were burying 14 people who were killed in earlier clashes.
Residents said that by Friday evening the streets were calm but there were conflicting accounts about whether opposition activists or security forces were in control of the town.
The unrest though was not on a national scale with most protests confined to the east around Benghazi, where support for Qaddafi has traditionally been weak. There were no reliable reports of major protests elsewhere, and state media said there had been pro-Qaddafi rallies in the capital.
Quryna newspaper quoted unnamed sources as saying the General People's Congress, or parliament, would adopt a "major shift" in government policy including appointing new people to senior positions. It gave no details and the sources could not be clarified.
A sermon at Friday prayers in Tripoli, broadcast on state television, urged people to ignore reports in foreign media "which doesn't want our country to be peaceful, which … is the aim of Zionism and imperialism, to divide our country."
Text messages sent to mobile phone subscribers thanked people who ignored calls to join protests. "We congratulate our towns which understood that interfering with national unity threatens the future of generations," it said.
