BENGHAZI: Libyan rebels were left red-faced Thursday after they announced four more countries have recognized their new national council only for three of the states to quickly deny the claim. Rebel spokesman Jalal Al-Gallal said Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and Spain now regard the National Transitional Council (NTC) as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people. There was no immediate reaction from Ottowa, but foreign ministries in Copenhagen, The Hague and Madrid quickly denied they recognized the council set up to rival the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. They said they saw the NTC, based in the eastern rebel bastion of Benghazi, as a partner in the dialogue to try and find a solution to the Libyan crisis, but not as the country's ruling authority. France, Italy, Qatar and Gambia have already recognized the NTC. The NTC was in mid-March the first to announce that France was the first country to recognise it, and Paris quickly confirmed the claim. A popular uprising against Gaddafi that began in mid-February has left the oil-rich north African state split between the largely Gaddafi-controlled west and the rebel east. Meanwhile, a meeting of the international contact group on Libya in Rome agreed Thursday to set up a new fund to aid Libyan rebels, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promising Washington would tap frozen assets of Gaddafi's regime. Ceasefire in the Libyan conflict could be reached within weeks, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Thursday following the meeting. International allies in the coalition against Gaddafi will hold their next meetings in the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, the UAE foreign minister said Thursday. Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al-Nahayan told reporters in Rome after the third meeting of the so-called “Contact Group” on Libya that the next meeting would be in his country, followed by one in Turkey in the second half of June. He said the precise dates of the meetings had not yet been set.
