Nato has stepped up pressure on the increasingly embattled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi with an air strike that reduced parts of his compound to a smouldering ruin.
A Libyan government spokesman condemned Monday's bombing as a failed assassination attempt, insisting the 69-year-old leader was healthy, "in high spirits" and carrying on business as usual.
A separate air strike elsewhere in Tripoli targeted Libyan TV and temporarily knocked it off the air, a government spokesman said.
Since an armed uprising erupted in mid-February, Gaddafi has been clinging to control in the western half of Libya, while opposition forces run most of the east. A Nato campaign of air strikes has sought to break a battlefield stalemate, and the US last week added armed US Predator drones to the mission.
Italy said on Monday its military would join in strategic bombing raids in Libya.
Nato said its latest air strike sought to destroy a communications headquarters used to co-ordinate attacks on civilians. A spokesman for the alliance said it was increasingly targeting facilities linked to Gaddafi's regime.
"We have moved on to those command and control facilities that are used to co-ordinate such attacks by regime forces," the spokesman said of the strike on Bab al-Aziziya, which was hit last month, early in the Nato air campaign.
Also on Monday, Gaddafi's forces unleashed new shelling on Misrata that killed at least 10 people, following a weekend pounding that belied government claims its troops were holding their fire as they withdrew from the western city that has been besieged for nearly two months.
Among the dead from a shattered residential neighbourhood was an entire family, according to a doctor in Misrata. Mourners later carried six crudely-constructed coffins of family members, plus one child who had been visiting, to a funeral near a mosque.
Gaddafi's son Saif later claimed his father had "millions of Libyans with him" and said Nato's mission was doomed to fail. "In history, no country has achieved victory with spies and traitors and collaborators. ... Nato, you are the losers," he was quoted as saying by the state news agency JANA.
