Libya: Relatives dug makeshift graves as dead bodies fill streets

Residents of Libya's capital Tripoli dug makeshift graves as the stench of decomposing bodies and burning garbage filled the streets.

More widespread summary killings during the battle for the Libyan capital were discovered as the city also faced a humanitarian crisis due to failing water and power supplies, Reuters Africa reports.

A week after the fall of Muammar al-Gaddafi, there were shortages of medicine and no effective government.

In a sign of continuing instability in the city, bursts of heavy machine gunfire and explosions could be heard overnight Saturday, Reuters says.

The rebels in control of most of Tripoli said they would also forcibly take Gaddafi's home town of Sirte if negotiations with loyalists in one of their last strongholds there failed.

The charred remains of about 53 people were found in a warehouse in Tripoli, apparently opponents of Gaddafi who were executed, Britain's Sky News reported on Saturday.

Sky broadcast pictures of a heap of burned skeletons, still smoldering, in an agricultural warehouse, where the victims were apparently prisoners.

The gruesome discovery comes a day after more than 120 decomposing bodies were found in a Tripoli hospital, which doctors had abandoned.

Stuart Ramsay of Sky News was led to the building by residents who had made the discovery.

The Independent reports:

Inside was a scene of mass cremation: more than four dozen corpses of what were once human beings, their ages and genders impossible to tell.

Ribcages, skulls and other bones lay in a blackened mess. Local people told of how the bodies of perhaps as many as 100 others lay nearby, including those of two soldiers with their hands behind their backs who had been executed for refusing to fire on the victims.

In the Tajoura district of the capital, local people prepared a mass grave for the bodies of 22 African men who appeared to have been recruited to fight for Gaddafi, Reuters reports.

One of the dead had his hands tied behind his back.

"The rebels asked them to surrender but they refused," said resident Haitham Mohammed Khat'ei.