By ANNE BARNARD, ADAM NOSSITER and ALAN COWELL
As rebel negotiators pressed loyalists in the desert town of Bani Walid to surrender peacefully, a convoy of Libyan Army vehicles was reported on Tuesday to have crossed the country’s southern border into Niger in what could represent a shift in the balance of power after six months of conflict.
There were conflicting reports about the nature and size of the column and about the possibility that Col.Muammar el-Qaddafi might have been traveling in it. Some accounts suggested that the convoy was predominantly made up of Tuareg fighters who had been fighting for Colonel Qaddafi as irregulars or mercenaries.
Ali Tarhouni, a senior official among the rebels who have driven loyalist forces out of Tripoli, said Tuesday the insurgents were investigating reports from several news agencies that a convoy of 200 to 250 Libyan military vehicles had entered Niger.
But the government in Niger sought to play down both the scale and composition of the convoy, and said Colonel Qaddafi was not traveling in it.
In a telephone interview, Marou Amadou, Niger’s minister of justice, described the group as a “small convoy” of unarmed people. Niger had allowed the convoy to cross into its territory for purely humanitarian reasons, he said.
Additionally, Moussa Ibrahim, the colonel’s spokesman, told Syrian television that Colonel Qaddafi was in “excellent health, planning and organizing for the defense of Libya” and was still in Libya.
“We are fighting and resisting for the sake of Libya and all Arabs,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying. “We are still strong and capable of turning the tables on NATO.”
In an interview, Mr. Tarhouni, deputy chairman of the rebel Transitional National Council, who is also responsible for energy matters, said on Tuesday that the Libyan government had “pretty much” confirmed reports ascribed to a French military source that the convoy had entered Agadez, in northern Niger, late Monday.
Speaking at the Mellitah oil and gas complex on the Mediterranean coast, a major installation that delivers natural gas to Italy via a pipeline, Mr. Tarhouni said the convoy had likely crossed through Algeria.
Asked whether the Libyan rebel administration had determined whether Colonel Qaddafi was in the convoy, Mr. Tarhouni said “not yet.”
A spokesman for the rebel military, Abdulrahman Busin, said, “That’s how Qaddafi used to travel here, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him.” But he expressed skepticism that the convoy could have gone unnoticed by NATO, whose warplanes have been conducting air operations over Libya under a United Nations Security Council mandate since March.
The French military source told Reuters, which first reported on the convoy, that he had been told Colonel Qaddafi and his son Seif al-Islam might join the convoy to reach Burkina Faso, a West African country bordering Niger that has offered them asylum.
The convoy was later reported to have moved on from Agadez toward the Niger capital, Niamey, 600 miles away in the southwest near the border with Burkina Faso.
Abdoulaye Harouna, owner of the Agadez Info newspaper, told The A.P. that he saw the group arrive in several dozen pickup trucks. At the head of the convoy, Mr. Harouna said, was a Tuareg rebel leader who had sought refuge in Libya several years ago and was believed to be fighting on behalf of Colonel Qaddafi.
Reuters said France may have brokered a deal between the rebels and Colonel Qaddafi but the French government declined to confirm the report. France was the first country to recognize the rebels who launched their uprising in February and has played a central role along with Britain and the United States in the NATO air campaign to weaken his forces.
In a statement Tuesday, Bernard Valero, the French foreign ministry spokesman, said that, wherever Colonel Qaddafi was, “he will have to face justice for all the crimes he has committed in the past 42 years ” since he took power in 1969.
He was responding to the question of whether France would be satisfied if Colonel Qaddafi went into exile. “With regard to Gaddafi, he is definitely out of the political picture of the new Libya emerging today,” Reuters quoted Mr. Valero as saying.“It will be up to the new Libyan authorities to decide about the judicial follow-up” either in Libya or at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges. Mr. Valero said he had no information about the convoy heading across Niger.
Officials of the NATO alliance at its headquarters in Brussels and its Libya operations base in Naples, Italy, also declined to comment formally, saying they did not discuss intelligence matters.
But a NATO official, who spoke in return for anonymity because of the delicacy of the situation, said: “NATO continuously receives reports and inputs from various sources regarding weapons, vehicles and even convoys of vehicles moving throughout Libya. We do not discuss the intelligence and surveillance information we collect, but we do publicly announce the actions we take when we act on what we consider are threats to the civilian population.”
“Just in the past two weeks two large convoys which were tracked moving towards a population center were destroyed because they constituted a threat,” the official said. “To be clear, our mission is to protect the civilian population in Libya, not to track and target thousands of fleeing former regime leaders, mercenaries, military commanders and internally displaced people.”
Mr. Tarhouni, the rebel official, was speaking at a ceremony handing over control of the Melita oil and gas complex to the new administration formed by the insurgents from the rebel forces who seized it from Colonel Qaddafi’s control last month.
It was handed back without any equipment damaged or missing, said workers at the complex. Mr. Tarhouni said the handover showed that rebels were not only capable of protecting the country’s wealth but that “we are capable of managing it.”
He said he hoped the refinery would go back to full production including 25 million to 30 million cubic meters of natural gas exported daily to Italy through the pipeline, within a few weeks and said the handover was a signal to international oil and gas companies that “your investment here is safe.”
“I’m so grateful to the Zintan rebels who liberated the Western mountains and secured this important complex,” Mr. Tarhouni said, standing alongside rebel commanders at the end of a jetty that extends a mile into a calm, bright blue sea, where he said oil tankers would once again be taking delivery within weeks. The facility exports crude oil as well as natural gas.
On Tuesday, Al Jazeera television said Libyan forces had struck a deal with loyalists in Bani Walid and planned to enter the town later in the day. But by early afternoon, there was no indication that they had done so.
Throughout Monday, rebel forces continued to observe the one-week extension given to Bani Walid to surrender, and the rebels’ acting minister of defense, Jalal al-Dghaili, said talks with supporters of Colonel Qaddafi there were continuing, according to the chairman of the transitional council’s media committee, Jalil el-Gallal. Rebel attention was focused on Bani Walid because figures from the Qaddafi government were last seen fleeing there, about 100 miles southeast of Tripoli.
Negotiations were continuing in the beleaguered holdout coastal city of Surt as well, said Mr. Busin, the military’s press liaison.
As the talks continued with loyalists from Bani Walid, rebel forces remained 60 miles from the town on both eastern and western approaches to the small city, but had left a road open to the north to allow families to flee if they wanted to do so, rebels at checkpoints near the city said.
