Witness describes scene in Tripoli

Col Gadafy may use mustard gas against a demonstration planned for Tripoli today, a frightened resident there said this morning.

Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland programme, Aysha, a young Libyan woman who had spent time in Ireland, said she believed security forces were listening in to her phone calls, but she no longer cared.

"At this moment you are calling from Ireland, I know they are listening into this call. I don't care anymore; this is the point of no return," she said.

Aysha outlined how "boys" were planning to march sometime today because the international media were still present in the city and they wanted the whole world to see.

"I don't know what he is planning to do to them. I just hope he doesn't open fire on them," she said.

She said she was scared by reports that Col Gadafy had mustard gas and would use it on demonstrators. "I personally think if he had it he would have used it in Benghazi. But they say he has it here and could use it today."

If the international media leaves the city before any demonstration, "these boys are dead", she warned.

She had also heard that men were being picked up by security forces. "They have been taken away and we don't know where they are," she said. "It's all very secretly done; he's making sure this is not being video taped he definitely does not want this to get out."

They could be hung, beaten or tortured. He sometimes did torture people and then made them go on state TV to say they were wrong. She said Col Gadafy had come on TV and told the mothers of Tripoli to bring their children to school and to go to work and he would keep them safe. But people were afraid to go out.

"I've been stuck here in the house for the past week. Women are very scared to go out because people say these mercenaries are around and rape and what not. I'm not sure of that, but we really don't know," she said.

She also said those wounded and the bodies of those killed had disappeared. "He is trying to cover his footsteps, he is trying to cover anything he did," she said.

He was pretending that everything had returned to normal, she said and had invited in the international media who were being driven around the streets of the capital.

"They were talking to random people on the street," she said. She said what the media didn't understand was that people couldn't speak to them. "There is no freedom of speech. There are spies all over the city," she said.

Aysha said Col Gadafy was killing innocent people while the whole world watches and had been doing it for 42 years. In the past, mothers had to watch there own student sons being hung in the university squares on live TV, she said.

She also spoke of the gunning down of 600 people in front of the Italian Embassy in Benghazi in 2006.

"This man is unreal, you have never witnessed anything like him. He will never give up... it's too much money, it's too much wealth, it's too much power," she said.