Seventeen of Libya's top football figures, including national team goalkeeper Juma Gtat, have defected to rebels battling to oust the country's leader Moammar Gadhafi, the BBC reported on Saturday.

Three other national team players and the coach of Tripoli's top club al-Ahly, Adel bin Issa, have also defected, in what the BBC described as "clearly a propaganda blow" for Gadhafi in "football-mad North Africa."

Government Commissioner to the Military Tribunal Judge Saqr Saqr on Friday charged seven people with engaging in a deadly gunfight in the northern port city of Tripoli a week earlier.

Saqr Saqr charged the seven suspects with forming armed gangs, exchanging gunfire with unlicensed arms, and killing a soldier and several civilians.

Pro- and anti-Syrian regime sit-ins were held by scores of protestors in different districts of the northern city of Tripoli on Friday as the army and security forces took strong measures to prevent clashes.

Interior Minister Marwan Charbel has ordered security forces to take “extraordinary measures.” He told An Nahar daily that he ordered the measures after he was informed that several sit-ins were planned to protest Syrian President Bashar Assad’s crackdown on protestors.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi issued a defiant audio message late Wednesday saying he had his "back to the wall" but did not fear death, and the battle against the Western "crusaders" would continue "to the beyond."

"We will resist and the battle will continue to the beyond, until you're wiped out. But we will not be finished," Gadhafi said in the message broadcast on Libyan television in homage to his comrade Khuwildi Hemidi, several members of whose family were killed Monday in NATO raids on his residence.

The March 14 general-secretariat on Wednesday held President Michel Suleiman and Premier Najib Miqati responsible for Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun’s “illness,” and vowed to unanimously confront the new cabinet.

“Every statement made by MP Michel Aoun confirms the revolutionary nature of the cabinet,” the general-secretariat said following its weekly meeting. Aoun’s verbal attacks “include threats of banishment, imprisonment and murder.”

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem denied on Wednesday that Iran and Hizbullah were providing military support to Damascus, saying they were only backing it politically.

“There is a political support for Syria to overcome the crisis and there is support for the reforms that (President Bashar) Assad announced” on Tuesday, he said in a televised address.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini called on Wednesday for an immediate halt to hostilities in Libya to allow humanitarian aid to reach the population in the strife-torn country.

Frattini called for "an immediate humanitarian suspension of hostilities" in Libya during a speech to the lower house of parliament.

Tripoli Mufti Sheikh Malek al-Shaar said he invited Premier Najib Miqati to a large-scale meeting that is scheduled to be held at the Dar al-Fatwa on Friday to study the necessary steps to declare the northern city free from arms.

Al-Shaar told An Nahar daily published Tuesday that his visit to Miqati was aimed at congratulating him on the formation of the cabinet and inviting him to the conference that will bring together Tripoli’s ministers, current and former MPs from the north, heads of municipalities and syndicates.

High-ranking opposition sources shrugged off the latest statements made by the premier and the Progressive Socialist Party chief over the Free Patriotic Movement leader’s verbal attacks.

“The final word is made by Syrian policies which are expressed by (FPM chief Michel) Aoun,” the sources told An Nahar daily published Wednesday.

People affiliated with the deputy head of the Arab Democratic Party, Rifaat Eid, were behind the deadly clashes that erupted between Sunnis and Alawites in the northern port city of Tripoli last Friday, al-Mustaqbal daily reported.

The newspaper said Tuesday there is “tangible proof” that a group of men affiliated with Eid were behind the eruption of violence between Tripoli’s districts of Bab al-Tabbaneh that is mainly Sunni close to former Premier Saad Hariri and Jabal Mohsen whose residents are Alawites allied with Hizbullah and Syria.