“Shame on you, people of Zawiya, control your children,” he said, addressing residents of the city outside Tripoli where the mosque attack took place. “They are loyal to bin Laden,” he said of those involved in the uprising. What do you have to do with bin Laden, people of Zawiya? They are exploiting young people … I insist it is bin Laden.”

The attacks Thursday aimed to push back a revolt that has moved closer to Gadhafi’s bastion in the capital, Tripoli. Most of the eastern half of Libya has already broken away, and parts of Gadhafi’s regime have frayed.

In the latest blow to the Libyan leader, a cousin who was one of his closest aides, Ahmed Gadhaf al-Dam, announced that he has defected to Egypt in protest against the regime’s bloody crackdown. He denounced what he called “grave violations to human rights and human and international laws.”

In Zawiya, 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Tripoli, an army unit attacked the Souq Mosque, where regime opponents had been camped for days in a protest calling for Gadhafi’s ouster, a witness said. The soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons and hit the mosque’s minaret with fire from an anti-aircraft gun, he said. Some of the young men among the protesters, who were inside the mosque and in a nearby lot, had hunting rifles for protection.

A doctor at a field clinic set up at the mosque said he saw the bodies of 10 dead, shot in the head and chest, as well as around 150 wounded.

The witness said that a day earlier, an envoy from Gadhafi had come to the city and warned protesters: “Either leave or you will see a massacre.” Zawiya is a key city near an oil port and refineries.

After Thursday’s assault, thousands massed in Zawiya’s main Martyrs Square by the mosque, shouting for Gadhafi to “leave, leave,” the witness said. “People came to send a clear message: We are not afraid of death or your bullets,” he said.

The other attack came at a small airport outside Misrata, Libya’s third largest city, where anti-government rebels claimed control Wednesday. Pro-government militiamen with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars barraged a line of their rivals who were guarding the airport, some armed with rifles, said one of the rebels who was involved in the battle.

During the fighting, the airport’s defenders seized an anti-aircraft gun used by the militias and turned it against them, he said.

A medical official at a military air base by the airport said five people were killed in the fighting — four from the opposition camp and one from the attackers — and 40 were wounded. He said personnel at the base had sided with the Misrata uprising and had disabled fighter jets there to prevent them being used against rebellious populaces.

“Now Misrata is totally under control of the people, but we are worried because we squeezed between Sirte and Tripoli, which are strongholds of Gadhafi,” he said. Sirte, a center for Gadhafi’s tribes, lies to the southeast of Misrata.

The militias pulled back in the late morning. In Misrata, the local radio — controlled by the opposition like the rest of the city — called on residents to march to the airport to reinforce it, said a woman who lives in downtown Misrata.

In the afternoon, it appeared fighting erupted again, she said, reporting heavy booms from the direction of the airport on the edge of the city, located about 120 miles (200 kilometers) east of Tripoli.

All the witnesses and medical officials spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Gadhafi’s crackdown has so far helped him maintain control of Tripoli, home to about a third of Libya’s 6 million population. But the uprising has divided the country and raised the specter of a civil war: In cities across the east, residents rose up and overwhelmed government buildings and army bases, joined in many cases by local army units that defected. In those cities, tribal leaders, residents and military officers have formed local administrations, passing out weapons looted from the security forces’ arsenals.

The leader’s cousin, Gadhaf al-Dam, is one of the highest level defections to hit the regime so far, after many ambassadors around the world, the justice minister and the interior minister all sided with the protesters.

Gadhaf al-Dam belonged to Gadhafi’s inner circle, officially his liaison with Egypt, but he also served as Gadhafi’s envoy to other world leaders and frequently appeared by his side.

In a statement issued in Cairo on Thursday, Gadhaf al-Dam said he had left Libya for Egypt “in protest and to show disagreement” with the crackdown.

Gadhafi’s control now has been reduced to the northwest corner around Tripoli, the southwest deserts and parts of the center. The uprisings in Misrata, Zawiya and several small towns between the capital and Tunisian border have further whittled away at that bastion.

The Zawiya resident said that until Thursday’s attack, Gadhafi opponents held total sway in the city after police fled days earlier. Residents had organized local watchgroups to protect government buildings and homes.

The capital, Tripoli, saw an outbreak of major protests against Gadhafi’s rule earlier this week, met with attacks by militiamen that reportedly left dozens dead.

Pro-Gadhafi militiamen — a mix of Libyans and foreign mercenaries — have clamped down on the city since the Libyan leader went on state TV Tuesday night and called on his supporters to take back the streets. Residents say militiamen roam Tripoli’s main avenues, firing the air, while neighborhood watch groups have barricaded side streets trying to keep the fighters out and protesters lay low.

At the same time, regular security forces have launched raids on homes around the city. A resident in the Ben Ashour neighborhood said a number of SUVs full of armed men swept into his district Wednesday night, broke into his neighbor’s home and dragged out a family friend as women in the house screamed. He said other similar raids had taken place on Thursday in other districts.

“Now is the time of secret terror and secret arrests. They are going to go home to home and liquidate opponents that way, and impose his (Gadhafi’s) control on Tripoli,” said the witness.

Another Tripoli resident said armed militiamen had entered a hospital, searching for protesters among the injured. He said a friend’s relative being treated there escaped only because doctors hid him.

International momentum has been building for action to punish Gadhafi’s regime for the bloodshed.

President Barack Obama said Wednesday the suffering in Libya “is outrageous and it is unacceptable,” and he directed his administration to prepare a full range of options, including possible sanctions that could freeze the assets and ban travel to the U.S. by Libyan officials.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy raised the possibility of the European Union cutting off economic ties.

Another proposal gaining some traction was for the United Nations to declare a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent it using warplanes to hit protesters. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said that if reports of such strikes are confirmed, “there’s an immediate need for that level of protection.”

Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said estimates of some 1,000 people killed in the violence in Libya were “credible,” although he stressed information about casualties was incomplete. The New York-based Human Rights Watch has put the death toll at nearly 300, according to a partial count.

Gadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam claimed Thursday that the reported death tolls have been exaggerated, although he didn’t provide his own figure. In a press conference aired on state TV, he said the number killed by police and the army had been limited and “talking about hundreds and thousands (killed) is a joke.”

He also said a committee had been formed to investigate alleged foreign involvement in the protests.

Earlier Thursday, Libyan TV showed Egyptian passports, CDs and cell phones purportedly belonging to detainees who had allegedly confessed to plotting “terrorist” operations against the Libyan people. Other footage showed a dozen men lying on the ground, with their faces down, blindfolded and handcuffed. Rifles and guns were laid out next to them.

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Michael reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb and Bassem Mroue contributed to this report.

“We are doing everything we can to protect American citizens,” Obama said in brief remarks at the White House, his first public comments after days of violence in Libya. He appeared with Clinton after the two conferred on the situation at the White House. Clinton is traveling to Geneva on Monday for talks on Libya.

“We strongly condemn the use of violence in Libya,” Obama said. “The suffering and bloodshed is outrageous, and it is unacceptable. So are threats and orders to shoot peaceful protesters and further punish the people of Libya.”

He spoke in the wake of uprisings in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia. The week-old protests in Libya have been met by a far more brutal response from militiamen loyal to Gadhafi.

Obama broke his public silence on the violence after the U.S. succeeded in beginning evacuations of American citizens from the chaotic situation.

Earlier, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that “a lot of options are under review — sanctions, other options” to end the fighting. Protesters are demanding an end to Gadhafi’s 42-year reign but facing a fierce and bloody crackdown.

Obama had issued a written statement on the situation in Libya last Friday, but this is the first time he has spoken publicly about the crisis.

“We are doing everything we can to protect American citizens,” Obama said. “That is my highest priority. In Libya, we’ve urged our people to leave the country, and the State Department is assisting those in need of support.”

“This is not simply a concern of the United States. The whole world is watching,” he said.

The country’s dictator, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, said on Tuesday that the protesters who have been killed “deserved to die,” and he vowed to fight “until the last drop of my blood.”

The U.S. and Libya have a complicated history. Under the recent Bush administration, the U.S. lifted sanctions and formally restored full diplomatic relations with Libya after its government renounced terrorism and dismantled its nuclear weapons program in 2003. At the time, the shift was heralded by State Department officials as “a success in our foreign policy.” A BBC correspondent went so far as to call it a “fairy tale.”

The State Department said that normalizing relations with Libya would “enable us to engage with Libyans more effectively on all issues,” naming human rights as one of the top priorities. A 2010 Congressional Research Service report described the U.S. rationale this way:

From 2004 onward, Bush Administration officials argued that broader normalization of U.S.-Libyan relations would provide opportunities for the United States to address specific issues of concern to Congress, including the outstanding legal claims, political and economic reform, the development of Libyan energy resources, and human rights.

Critics, however, said that as the U.S. restored diplomatic ties with the repressive regime, it put narrow strategic interests ahead of democracy and human rights.

“The State Department continues to engage Arab dictators at the expense of dissidents who support transitions to peaceful, modern societies,” Libyan-American activist Mohamed Eljahmi wrote in a Washington Post column in 2008. Eljahmi’s brother, Fathi Eljahmi, was a prominent Libyan democracy activist who died in 2009 after years of persecution and imprisonment by the Libyan government. As a U.S. senator, Joe Biden interceded on Eljahmi’s behalf, leading to his release, but it was temporary — Eljahmi was abducted again two weeks later.

“It’s tricky,” Tom Malinowski, Washington Director of Human Rights Watch, told me. Malinowski said that Human Rights Watch was not against diplomatic normalization, but said that “at times during that period, human rights were downplayed more than we felt appropriate to smooth the path to more normal relations.”

“Dealing with Qaddafi’s Libya was never easy,” he said. “The judgment was made that Libyans did not react well to public pressure. I think in retrospect that was a misjudgment.”

A U.S. embassy cable from 2008 noted the disappointment of “a number of Libyans” that the United States did not “more publicly and directly urge greater respect for human rights” immediately after diplomatic relations were re-established.

“Absent a clear message that engagement on human rights will be a necessary adjunct of an expanded U.S.-Libya relationship, meaningful progress in this area is unlikely,” read the cable, which was released as part of the WikiLeaks cache.

American oil companies eager to tap Libya’s oil reserves had also put pressure on the U.S. to normalize its relations with the country. David Goldwyn, a longtime State Department official and then head of the U.S.-Libya Business Association — a trade group founded by oil companies — told Bloomberg in 2007 that American companies were losing business because the U.S. wasn’t courting the country as aggressively as other European countries were. Goldwyn currently works as the State Department’s Coordinator for International Energy Affairs. His official bio lists that he was president of his own energy consulting firm, but does not mention his work with Libya.

The trade group’s website, which happens to be down at the moment, describes it as the “only U.S. trade association focusing on the United States and Libya” and says it was “organized to enhance the US-Libya relationship.” (See the cached version from four days ago.)

We’ve asked the State Department for comment on Goldwyn’s work for the U.S.-Libya Business Group but have not yet received a response. The White House said on Tuesday that it was “looking at” a proposal by Sen. John Kerry to re-impose sanctions on Libya.

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Expressen’s online edition said its correspondent interviewed Abdel-Jalil outside the local parliament in the Libyan city of Al Bayda. A longer version of the interview was to be published in Expressen’s paper edition on Thursday.

Gadhafi has accepted Libya’s responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground, and paid compensation to the victims’ families. But he hasn’t admitted personally giving the order for the attack.

Abdel-Jalil told Expressen that Gadhafi gave the order to Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the bombing.

“To hide it, he (Gadhafi) did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.

Al-Megrahi was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and would die soon. He is still alive.

Expressen spokeswoman Alexandra Forslund said its reporter in Libya, Kassem Hamade, taped the 40-minute interview, which was conducted in Arabic and translated to Swedish.

Most of the victims in the Lockerbie bombing were Americans, and al-Megrahi’s release has been criticized by members of the U.S. Congress and the victims’ families.

Bob Monetti, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son Richard was killed in the bombing, said he’s glad to hear a former official say what’s been clear to him all along.

“If you went to the trial, there was no question about who did it and why, and who ordered it,” Monetti said.

Lisa Gibson, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, lost her 20-year-old brother Ken in the bombing.

“I’m not surprised for him to say that Gadhafi is responsible because ultimately we know that,” Gibson said.

Al-Megrahi’s trial was conducted at a special Scottish court set up in the Netherlands after years of diplomatic maneuvering.

In Britain, some Lockerbie victims’ relatives have questioned his conviction. They argue that insufficient attention was paid to the possibility that the bombing was carried out not by Libyan intelligence but by Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorists.

Their case was bolstered when the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Board raised questions about evidence used to convict al-Megrahi. The former Libyan agent had been in the process of appealing his conviction when he was released.

Before the unrest broke out, Gadhafi had been trying to transform Libya from a pariah state to an accepted member of the international community.

He renounced terrorism and his program for weapons of mass destruction, and paid billions of dollars in compensation to families of Lockerbie victims.

Those decisions paved the way for warmer relations with the West and the lifting of U.N. and U.S. sanctions.

Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey, contributed to this report.

International outrage mounted a day after Gadhafi vowed to defend his rule and called on supporters to crack down on anti-government protesters. Gadhafi’s retaliation has already been the harshest in the Arab world to the wave of anti-government protests sweeping the Middle East.

Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said estimates of some 1,000 people killed in the violence in Libya were “credible,” although he stressed information about casualties was incomplete. The New York-based Human Rights Watch has put the death toll at nearly 300, according to a partial count.

The fighting in Tripoli came as the opposition reportedly seized control of Misrata, with witnesses saying people were honking their horns and raising pre-Gadhafi flags from the monarchy to celebrate.

Misrata would be the first major city in the west to fall to anti-government forces, which have mainly been concentrated in the east. Faraj al-Misrati, a local doctor, said six residents had been killed and 200 injured since Feb. 18, when protesters attacked offices and buildings affiliated with Gadhafi’s regime.

He said residents had formed committees to protect the city, clean the streets and treat the injured.

“The solidarity among the people here is amazing, even the disabled are helping out,” he said in a telephone interview.

New videos posted by Libya’s opposition on Facebook also showed scores of anti-government protesters raising the flag from the pre-Gadhafi monarchy on a building in Zawiya, on the outskirts of Tripoli. Another showed protesters lining up cement blocks and setting tires ablaze to fortify positions on a square inside the capital.

The footage couldn’t be independently confirmed.

Gadhafi defiantly vowed to fight to his “last drop of blood” and roared at supporters to strike back against Libyan protesters to defend his embattled regime Tuesday in a televised speech that served as an all-out call for his backers to impose control over the capital and take back other cities.

After a week of upheaval, protesters backed by defecting army units have claimed control over almost the entire eastern half of Libya’s 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) Mediterranean coast, including several oil-producing areas.

“You men and women who love Gadhafi … get out of your homes and fill the streets,” Gadhafi said. “Leave your homes and attack them in their lairs.”

Celebratory gunfire by Gadhafi supporters rang out in the capital of Tripoli after the leader’s speech, while in protester-held Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, people threw shoes at a screen showing his address, venting their contempt.

A woman who lives near downtown Tripoli said heavy gunfire erupted Wednesday morning as armed Gadhafi backers and mercenaries hired from other countries opened fire on the streets. She said her nephew has been missing since Tuesday.

“He went to join the protests and he didn’t come back. The whole family is panicking,” she said. “We are under siege.”

She said the streets were empty and even injured people couldn’t go to the hospital for fear of being shot.

Gadhafi appears to have lost the support of at least one major tribe, several military units and his own diplomats, including Libya’s ambassador in Washington, Ali Adjali, and deputy U.N. Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi.

The Libyan Embassy in Austria also condemned the use of “excessive violence against peaceful demonstrators” and said in a statement Wednesday that it was representing the Libyan people.

International alarm has risen over the crisis, which sent oil prices soaring to the highest level in more than two years on Tuesday and sparked a scramble by European and other countries to get their citizens out of the North African nation. The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting that ended with a statement condemning the crackdown, expressing “grave concern” and calling for an “immediate end to the violence” and steps to address the legitimate demands of the Libyan people.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy also pressed Wednesday for European Union sanctions against Libya’s regime because of its violent crackdown on protesters, and raised the possibility of cutting all economic and business ties between the EU and the North African nation.

“The continuing brutal and bloody repression against the Libyan civilian population is revolting,” Sarkozy said in a statement. “The international community cannot remain a spectator to these massive violations of human rights.”

Italian news reports have said witnesses and hospital sources in Libya are estimating there are 1,000 dead in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, alone.

“We have no complete information about the number of people who have died,” Frattini said in a speech to a Catholic organization in Rome ahead of a briefing in Parliament on Libya. “We believe that the estimates of about 1,000 are credible.”

Libya is the biggest supplier of oil to Italy, which has extensive energy, construction and other business interests in the north African country and decades of strong ties.

Frattini said the Italian government is asking that the “horrible bloodshed” cease immediately despite Gadhafi’s vow to fight on and cling to power.

Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb in Cairo, Frances D’Emilio in Rome and Angela Doland in Paris contributed to this report.