Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi joked with journalists and bounded up a flight of stairs to dispel rumours about his health after a report he was in a coma suffering a blood clot to the brain.
The veteran leader appeared before journalists and television cameras late on Monday, taking aim at ”Arab intelligence agencies” for spreading the rumours and threatening to sue a news agency that carried the report.
A healthy-looking Gadaffi, one of the world’s longest-serving leaders, made sure the press was on hand as he greeted Ghanaian President and African Union head John Kufuor for an official visit.
”Intelligence agencies were paid to invent the reports,” Gadaffi said, and when pressed to elaborate, added: ”Arab intelligence agencies and their masters.”
He said also said he plans to sue ”whoever propagated the report”, which triggered a swirl of rumours about the maverick leader whose one-time pariah state has now returned to the international fold.
”Whoever shoots at us, we will shoot at him,” he declared.
Palestinian news agency Maan apologised for its report and later withdrew it from its website, saying it had come from an unreliable source.
The report had quoted ”informed sources” as saying that Gadaffi had suffered a blood clot on the brain and was in a coma after being rushed to hospital on Sunday.
Gadaffi has frequently turned his back on the Arab world, accusing it of failing to support Libya when it was facing international sanctions over the blowing up of an airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988.
Libya’s state news agency Jana said the rumours about Gadaffi, who was born in 1942, were the subject of joking during a telephone conversation with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi on Monday.
”The phone call was an opportunity for the Italian prime minister to joke about a lie created by a traitor media outlet about the brother leader’s health,” Jana said.
Prodi, on a visit to Prague, said he spoke with Gadaffi for an hour-and-a-half late on Sunday and again on Monday. ”He told me that he was well and these things were said from time to time about political leaders,” Prodi told a news conference. ”I told him that at home in Italy we say that you will enjoy a long life in such circumstances.”
Their discussions also touched the case of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor on death row in Libya. They were convicted of infecting hundreds of children with Aids, an issue that has renewed tensions between Tripoli and the West.
Oil-rich Libya has gradually returned to the international fold after Gadaffi’s December 2003 announcement that he was abandoning weapons of mass destruction programmes.
The rumours about Gadaffi’s health emerged almost exactly a year to the day after Washington announced in May 2006 it was restoring diplomatic ties with Tripoli and removing it from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Gadaffi is due to address the United Kingdom’s prestigious Oxford University Union by satellite link on Wednesday, in a mark of his newfound acceptability in the West.
He seized power in a bloodless coup in the North African nation in 1969, but he has always shunned the title of president, instead calling himself ”guide of the revolution”. — Sapa-AFP