Libyan forces loyal to Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi have captured three crew members of a Dutch naval helicopter who were rescuing European citizens, the Dutch Defense Ministry said, the first report of Westerners being held in Libya’s bloody and unfolding uprising.Rico says the Dutch are too nice for their own good...
Otte Beeksma, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, said the pro-Qaddafi forces had also captured two civilians being rescued— one Dutch, the other from an unspecified European country— who had since been released. Dutch officials declined to give personal details of the crew members while confidential negotiations for their release were underway. The authorities had kept word of the capture a secret until a Dutch newspaper broke the story. Mr. Beeksma said the crew of a Lynx helicopter had landed in the coastal city of Surt— Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown and one of his strongholds— after flying from a Dutch warship, the HNLMS Tromp, anchored offshore. The helicopter was “surrounded by armed Libyan forces" late on Sunday afternoon.
The two people being evacuated were transferred to the Dutch Embassy in Tripoli, but the crew and their helicopter were still being held. Mr. Beeksma did not identify the two people who were being rescued.
The use of military personnel in such operations is not limited to the Dutch authorities. British news reports have said that British special forces accompanied a rescue effort by the Royal Air Force to pluck oil workers to safety from remote desert encampments. But, so far, there has been no indication of other military personnel being taken prisoner.
Mr. Beeksma, speaking in a telephone interview, said “intensive negotiations” were underway to secure the release of three naval personnel seized during what he called a consular operation.
Their capture came at a time when both sides in Libya’s turmoil insist there should be no foreign military intervention on the ground, although some rebels in the east have spoken in favor of airstrikes to cripple Colonel Qaddafi’s air force, which conducted bombing raids in fighting for the oil port of Brega.
But there was some concern that the three Dutch crew member could risk being used as propaganda tools, like a group of British Royal Marines captured in the Persian Gulf by Iranian forces in 2007 and paraded in front of the television cameras when they were released by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
04 March 2011
Oops is now a Dutch term
Marlise Simons and Alan Cowell have an article in The New York Times about the latest problem in Libya:
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