TRIPOLI/WASHINGTON: Libyan rebels met senior White House officials in Washington Friday to seek cash and diplomatic legitimacy in their battle to topple Muammar Gaddafi. The head of the rebel council's executive bureau, Mahmoud Jebril, met President Barack Obama's national security adviser and other senior officials. Jebril, a US-educated technocrat who has become a public face of the rebels, has made a plea for Washington to free up some $180 million in frozen Gaddafi assets to fund the campaign. The Washington meeting came a day after the council's chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil met British Prime Minister David Cameron in London, securing a promise of more aid. “To those who stand behind Gaddafi they must know his regime is ending. There is no place for Muammar Gaddafi in Libya's future,” Jalil said on Friday, promising amnesty to anyone who defects from Gaddafi's side. Russia, which is critical of the NATO mission, on Friday called for talks between the rebels and the Libyan government. Moscow also said it was up to the UN Security Council to decide how to distribute Gaddafi's frozen assets, and argued that the funds should not be used to arm either side. The rebels say they need funds urgently to pay salaries and run the areas under their control, and want international legitimacy to allow them access to the frozen assets. Meanwhile, International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said Friday he would seek arrest warrants on May 16 for three people considered most responsible for crimes against humanity in Libya. The prosecutor's office also said it would reveal the three names, with diplomats saying Libyan leader Gaddafi is likely to top the list. 11 clerics killed Eleven Libyan Muslim clerics were killed in a NATO airstrike, a government spokesman told a news conference Friday at which an imam called for 11,000 Western and Gulf citizens to be killed in revenge. “So far, the death toll is 11 martyrs of the imams” who had gathered in Brega to the east of Tripoli, Moussa Ibrahim said, putting the number of wounded people at 50, including five in critical condition. The imams' “aim was to call upon their brothers and sisters in the eastern part of the country and everywehere to join them in the call of peace and dialogue in Libya,” he said, referring to rebels seeking strongman Muammar Gaddafi's ouster and who are predominantly based in the east. “But in the early hours they were attacked by the barbaric, inhumane NATO - they were hit in their sleep,” he said. Later in the news conference an imam identified as Nureddin Al-Mijrah called for 1,000 people from a list of Western and Gulf countries to be killed for each of the dead imams. “This will have a very bad consequence as it will push us towards fighting back in all Islam against those who are humiliating our religion and our nation,” he said of the Brega strike. We “call upon the Muslims all around the world to take revenge for our brothers who died today. For every man we should take down one thousand men,” he said. Ibrahim said before Mijrah's remarks that his views were his own and not those of the government, but he was still part of the speaker lineup at the government-organized news conference. Earlier, state television put the toll from the Brega strike at 16 “civilians” killed, citing a military source.
