Second top-ranking Libyan bails on Gadhafi

UNITED NATIONS – A second high-profile defection of a senior Libyan official in as many days on Thursday gave credence to the claim Moammar Gadhafi’s inner circle may be "crumbling."

Ali Abdussalam Treki, the former Libyan president of the United Nations General Assembly, renounced the Gadhafi regime a day after Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Imhimid Kusa defected to Britain.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said Kusa’s decision to flee showed "the desperation and the fear right at the heart of the crumbling and rotten Gadhafi regime," and called it a "serious blow to Gadhafi’s authority."

Treki, who served twice as Libyan foreign minister, had been Gadhafi’s first pick to take over as Libya’s new ambassador to the UN after the defection of the serving ambassador February 25.

He said in a statement posted on several Libyan opposition websites that he would not take up any official position, and condemned the "spilling of blood."

"We shouldn’t leave our country to an unknown fate," Treki wrote. "Our nation has the right to live in freedom, democracy and prosperity." Treki was reportedly in Cairo Thursday.

The United States had in any event denied Treki a visa to attend the UN as ambassador, prompting the Gadhafi regime to this week name former Nicaraguan foreign minister Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann to take up the post. The Sandinista government of Nicaragua is, along with Venezuela, among the few allies the Gadhafi regime has internationally.

The Nicaraguan mission to the UN on Thursday said it was "postponing" a scheduled Friday news conference for d’Escoto, who is also a former president of the UN General Assembly, without giving any further information on when it would be held.

Elsewhere at the UN, Ibrahim Dabbashi, the Libyan deputy ambassador to the UN who defected Feb. 21, said "most" high Libyan officials now want to renounce Gadhafi.

"I don’t think it is easy," he told The Associated Press. "But anyway, who has the will, he will find the way."

Al Jazeera television said Thursday that "a number of figures" close to Gadhafi had left Libya for Tunis, the initial destination of Kusa, who had asked to travel there on medical leave, according to a spokesman for the Gadhafi regime.

As was Kusa, Treki had for decades been a Gadhafi regime insider. He was appointed special adviser to Gadhafi in 2004 before helping the Libyan leader spread his influence throughout Africa by spearheading Libya’s relations with the continent.