NATO missiles target Gaddafi's compound

Witnesses (quoted by Al Jazeera) are reportedly saying that jets carried out eight strikes in roughly three hours in an unusually heavy bombardment of Tripoli, with four explosions rocking the Libyan capital shortly after 2am [0000 GMT] on Tuesday.

They were quickly followed by two more blasts. Al Jazeera reports that that an intelligence agency was also targeted by the strikes.

Late on Monday, witnesses also reported two explosions in the capital as jets flew overhead, adding that smoke was rising from a site near the offices of Libyan television and state news agency JANA.

"It started off at the [Libyan state] TV station," Trabulsia, a resident in Tripoli, told Al Jazeera. "After that ... there was six big hits, two were at the compound where Colonel Gaddafi stays and the other four were at an intelligence building in Zawiyyah Street.

"First it was a bombard from the air from the NATO airplanes and the others were rockets where you can hear them very very loudly. After you hear the rocket you hear a huge explosion and even some of the civillians reported the reflection of those bombardments," she said.

"The sounds were very, very heavy and there was smoke reported after every strike."

On Tuesday Libyan officials said four children were wounded by flying glass caused by blasts from NATO strikes in the Tripoli area overnight. "Two of the children were seriously hurt and are in intensive care in hospital," said one official.

Officials took foreign journalists twice to Tripoli's Dahmani neighbourhood to see what they said were the results of NATO strikes.

On the first visit, journalists saw a government building housing the high commission for children that had been completely destroyed. The old colonial building had been damaged before in what officials said was a NATO strike on 30April.

The roof of part of the building was blown away along with one wall, and the basement was visible through the destroyed floor.

A guard at the site said the building was hit around 11pm (2100 GMT) on Monday. There were no reports of casualties in those strikes.

The blasts came after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO chief, said time was running out for Gaddafi, who "should realise sooner rather than later that there's no future for him or his regime".

An international coalition began carrying out strikes on pro-Gaddafi forces on March 19, under a UN resolution to protect civilians. NATO took command of operations over Libya on 31 March.

The Libyan regime said on 1 May that Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, one of the Libyan leader's sons, and three of his grandchildren were killed in a NATO air strike on a compound in Tripoli.

On Monday, rebels said NATO bombed government arms depots four times during the day about 30 km southeast of Zintan, a town in the Western Mountains region where conflict is escalating.