TRIPOLI—Fighters supporting Libya’s interim government have raced into the eastern outskirts of Sirte backed by Nato warplanes and are fighting street-to-street battles with loyalists of Muammar Qaddafi in his hometown.

Thick black smoke billowed into the air as National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters battled at a roundabout about 2 kilometers from the center of the key town on Monday.

Meanwhile in New York, Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister appointed by the former rebels’ NTC, urged the United Nations Security Council to lift some of the economic sanctions on Libya, but Nato should stay until civilians are no longer being killed, the country’s de facto prime minister told council members on Monday. He also thanked the UN council on Monday for two resolutions that established the sanctions against the Muammar Qaddafi regime and created a Nato-led no-fly zone to protect civilians earlier this year.

The thud of large explosions could be heard as Nato aircraft roared overhead, but Nato would not comment on latest operations in Sirte. NTC fighters fought with machine guns and rifles and moved tanks and heavy artillery into the town.

“[NTC fighters] are entering the city from the east for the first time,” Al-Jazeera’s Sue Turton, reporting from the front lines, said. “But there is only so much that Nato can do because there are civilians still in the city.”

NTC fighters had pulled out of the town a day earlier after facing stiff resistance.

Sirte, besides the town of Bani Walid, are still controlled by loyalists of Qaddafi, who was driven out of the capital Tripoli after months of fighting.

Meanwhile, Libya’s new rulers have revealed the discovery of a mass grave believed to hold the remains of more than 1,700 people in the Libyan capital.

Khalid Sharif, a spokesman for the NTC’s military council, said the bodies were those of prisoners who were executed at Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail in 1996—though it was not immediately possible to verify the claim. “We found the place where all these martyrs were buried,” said Sharif, adding it was evidence of “criminal acts” by Qaddafi’s regime. Salim al-Farjani, a member of the committee set up to identify the remains, appealed for international help. “We call on foreign organizations and the international community to help us in this task of identifying the remains of more than 1,700 people,” said Farjani.

The massacre of the inmates helped trigger the revolt in February, when families of Abu Salim victims in the eastern city of Benghazi called for protests against the arrest of their lawyer. Farjani said he witnessed the gruesome site where the Abu Salim victims were found. “We were invited to visit the place where the corpses of the prisoners at Abu Salim were found, where we saw scattered human bones,” he said.

Farjani also referred to “egregious acts committed against dead bodies, on which acid was poured to eliminate any evidence of this massacre.” 

(MCT, AP)