Reply #36: Shell in Misurata Adds to a City's Grim Toll

[joshcryer]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11122/1143500-82-0.stm?cmpid=nationworld.xml">Shell in Misurata Adds to a City's Grim Toll
MISURATA, Libya -- On the night he would die, Muhammad Abdulhamid Sbikhee, a night watchman at a local school, was at home with his wife and their seven children. They shared a small, ground-floor apartment that opened to a tiny yard that opened in turn to an urban dirt alley.

Misurata had been shelled for several weeks running, and Mr. Sbikhee, a quiet man with a thick gray beard, was both worried and prepared, a neighbor and his wife said.

His children's two bedrooms faced the direction from where many of the high-explosive shells and rockets from the forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had been fired. Around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, when more shells began landing and exploding in his neighborhood, Mr. Sbikhee and his older son sent his children, ages 1 to 17, to the other side of their apartment. He told them to hurry through the kitchen, outside, across the narrow slot of open sky, and to sleep on cushions he had arranged in a storage room near the cement wall beside the alley.

His instincts were good. It was safer there. Then he returned inside, to the bedroom he shared with his wife, Soad Warayeth. The artillery shell met him there.

Osama killed. Meanwhile, Misrata still shelled indiscriminately.