One of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's most powerful and longest-serving associates has called on him to end his resistance to the uprising against him in Libya.
In a BBC interview, Interior Minister Gen Abdul Fatteh Younis says Col Gaddafi's regime is collapsing, and forecasts that he will last only a few more days.
Having known the colonel for 47 years, Gen Younis says he will not surrender.
"Either he will commit suicide or he will resist till he falls," he says.
Gen Younis was sent to Benghazi at the end of last week to oversee the suppression of the demonstrations here.
Instead, he rang Col Gaddafi and persuaded him not to use warplanes to crush the protesters.
After this evidence that he was changing sides, there seems to have been an attempt to assassinate him.
Col Gaddafi actually announced the general's death in a speech on Libyan television, but it was a bodyguard who died instead, in a shooting incident in Benghazi.
All this persuaded the general to come over to the uprising. At present he is living in a secret house on the outskirts of Benghazi. I was taken there to meet him.
He appealed to Colonel Gaddafi to stop fighting the uprising.
"My dear brother," he said, "when Benghazi fell you should have realised that the end had come. I hoped you would leave for Venezuela or somewhere else."
"May God show you the righteous way, and stop the annihilation of our people."
Source: BBC NEWS
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