Tripoli comes under heavy NATO bombing

By the afternoon, war planes were striking different parts of the city several times an hour, hour after hour, rattling windows and sending clouds of grey smoke into the sky.

The Libyan government attributed earlier blasts to NATO air strikes on military compounds in the capital, a day after rebels drove Muammar Gaddafi's forces out of a western town.

Bombs have been striking the city every few hours since Monday, at a steadily increasing pace. Air strikes were previously rarer and usually at night.

Some of the bombs appeared to hit in the vicinity of Gaddafi's vast Bab al-Aziziya residential compound.

A Libyan official, speaking over a loudspeaker in a hotel where foreign journalists stay under government supervision, said some strikes had hit the Popular Guard compound and the Revolutionary Guard compound, giving no comment on casualties.

A NATO military official in Naples, headquarters of the alliance's Libya operation, confirmed the current strikes were the heaviest on Tripoli so far.

"Definitely there are more strikes going into Tripoli than there have been in the past ... This is just to increase the pressure on the Gaddafi regime and it's been going on like this for a couple of days now ..."

"The targets we are striking are the same types as ... in the past -- command and control, ammunition storage, vehicle storage -- any function or system the Gaddafi regime can use to attack civilians."

Libyan TV said late on Monday NATO had bombed the al-Karama neighbourhood and a civilian telecommunications station.

NATO said it hit a military "command and control target."

Further east, Gaddafi's troops and the rebels have been in stalemate for weeks, neither able to hold territory on a road between Ajdabiyah, which Gaddafi's forces shelled on Monday, and the Gaddafi-held oil town of Brega further west.

Rebels control the east of Libya, the western city of Misrata and the range of mountains near the border with Tunisia. They have been unable to advance on the capital against Gaddafi's better-equipped forces, despite NATO air strikes.

In Brussels on Monday, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he would repeat calls for NATO allies to boost involvement at an alliance defence ministers meeting this week.

NATO decided last week to extend operations in Libya until the end of September.