CAIRO: Anti-regime protests spread closer to the Libyan capital on Sunday and new fighting erupted in the flashpoint city of Benghazi, as Human Rights Watch said it feared a catastrophe with more than 100 people dead in an iron-fisted crackdown.
Witnesses told AFP by telephone that security forces clashed with anti-regime protesters in the Mediterranean city of Misrata, 200 kilometres (120 miles) from Tripoli.
Demonstrators were on the streets there to show support for residents of Benghazi, 1,000 kilometres from the capital, who have endured the brunt of a crackdown in eastern Libya, they said.
The witnesses said Libyan security forces backed by "African mercenaries" had been shooting into the crowds "without discrimination."
In second city Benghazi, there were protests against the four-decade rule of Moamer Kadhafi and new fighting, lawyer Mohammed al-Mughrabi told AFP by telephone.
"Lawyers are demonstrating outside the Northern Benghazi court; there are thousands here. We have called it Tahrir Square Two," Mughrabi said, referring to the Cairo square central to protests that brought down Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Separately, others are "storming the garrison" and "taking fire from snipers," Mughrabi said, without elaborating.
"At least 200 have been killed altogether (since the outbreak of unrest this week) but we can't verify from hospital. We are pleading for the Red Cross to send field hospitals. We can't take it any more."
Speaking earlier to Al-Jazeera television on a patchy telephone line, a resident warned that Benghazi was turning into a scene of "out-of-sight massacres."
"It feels like an open war zone between protesters and security forces," said Fathi Terbeel, a protest organiser.
"Our numbers show that more than 200 people have been killed," Terbeel said. "God have mercy on them."
The bloodshed reached a peak in Benghazi on Saturday when mourners heading to funerals of people killed by security forces targeted a military barracks on the route to the cemetery, a newspaper editor told AFP.
They threw firebombs and troops responded with live rounds in which "at least 12 people were killed and many more injured," said Quryna chief editor Ramadan Briki, citing security sources.
A medical official at Al-Jalal hospital in Benghazi told HRW he had received 20 dead bodies on Saturday evening, and a further 25 demonstrators in critical condition, most with gunshot wounds.
The death toll in anti-Kadhafi protests raging since Tuesday has reached at least 104, said Human Rights Watch (HRW), citing reports from medics and witnesses.
"It's an incomplete picture because communications with Libya is extremely difficult," HRW's Tom Porteous told AFP by telephone.
"We are very concerned that under the communication blackout that has fallen on Libya since yesterday a human rights catastrophe is unfolding," added the director of HRW's London office.
In Al-Baida, another city at the centre of the unrest east of Benghazi, "Islamist extremists" have taken hostage members of the security forces and civilians, a senior official told AFP on Sunday, asking not to be identified.
Justice Minister Mustafa Abdeljalil started negotiations late on Saturday for the release of the hostages, he said.
Amnesty International urged Kadhafi to "immediately rein in his security forces amid reports of machine guns and other weapons being used against protesters and a spiralling death toll."
Before the latest round of bloodshed in Benghazi flared on Saturday, the New York-based HRW said security forces had already killed more than 80 anti-regime protesters in eastern Libya earlier in the week.
Porteous said the government had shut down all Internet communications in Libya since late Saturday and that interference on phone services had made it "extremely difficult to get information."
After regime opponents used Facebook to mobilise the initial protests, the social networking website has been blocked and Internet connections unreliable, according to Tripoli and Benghazi residents.
Britain has deplored what it branded a "horrifying" crackdown, and US President Barack Obama has condemned the use of violence against peaceful protesters in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen as unrest sweeps the Middle East.
Austria on Sunday announced it was sending a military plane to Malta in readiness to evacuate European citizens from Libya or other Arab countries, after Washington cautioned US citizens to stay away from eastern Libya.
Kadhafi, 68, is the longest-serving leader in the Arab world. His oil-producing North African state was long a Western pariah, but relations had improved markedly in recent years.
The veteran ruler has made no public comment on the unprecedented challenge to his four-decade regime, part of a region-wide wave of popular uprisings that have already toppled the regimes in Libya's neighbours Tunisia and Egypt.
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