By William Maclean, Emma Farge
REUTERS

TRIPOLI: Libya’s neighbor Tunisia jailed Moammar Gadhafi’s former prime minister Thursday, and Libya’s new rulers said they were tightening their grip on the desert towns where Gadhafi himself may be hiding.
In the highest profile detention of a Gadhafi associate to date, a Tunisian court sentenced ex-Prime Minister Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi to six months in jail on charges of illegally entering the country Wednesday.

“Mahmoudi was arrested yesterday [Wednesday] evening,” a Tunisian Interior Ministry official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
“[He] was arrested because he entered Tunisian territory illegally … He did not have an entry stamp in his passport,” the official added.

The justice minister in Libya’s new government said Tripoli would request that the former prime minister be extradited to stand trial in Libya.
“Baghdadi directly oversaw the operations which had to do with the killings of Libyans,” the minister, Mohammad al-Alagi, said on Al-Arabiya television station.

The National Transitional Council, Libya’s de facto government since Gadhafi was swept from the capital last month, has been anxious to show that it can establish firm control over a country riven by tribal and regional rivalries.
The new government said it was consolidating its grip on Sabha and other oasis towns in the far south of the country which had sided with Gadhafi.

“Our revolutionaries are controlling 100 percent of Sabha city, although there are some pockets of resistance by snipers,” NTC military spokesman Ahmad Bani told reporters in the capital, Tripoli. TURN TO PAGE 10FROM PAGE 1“This resistance is hopeless … They know very well that at the end of the day they will show the white flag or they will die. They are fighting for themselves, not for the tyrant,” he said, referring to Gadhafi.
Until now some parts of Sabha, the traditional base for Gadhafi’s own tribe about 800 kilometers south of Tripoli, had been occupied by fighters loyal to him.

The council says its forces have now also taken control of Jufra, to the north-east of Sabha, and the nearby oasis towns of Sokna, Waddan and Houn.
The NTC official said the manhunt for Gadhafi, in hiding for weeks though he occasionally issues defiant audio messages, was drawing closer to its target.

“There is no whole tribe or city on Gadhafi’s side,” said Bani. “I’m asking everyone in the south who has any news about the tyrant or his loyalists … to notify the legal bodies about them.”
“We are doing our best looking for the tyrant. There is some news here and there that he ran away from Sabha to another place but it cannot be confirmed.”

In Tripoli Thursday, the U.S. ambassador returned to work after a hiatus caused by the civil war, and predicted a quick end to the fighting. “I think it is a matter of time [for] Gadhafi and his remaining loyalists. Their resistance is finished,” Ambassador Gene Cretz told reporters at a ceremony to mark the re-opening of the U.S. mission.

The country’s new rulers were faring less well on the battlefield, aside from advances in the far south. In the two biggest towns where Gadhafi loyalists are still holding out, Sirte and Bani Walid, the NTC’s offensive has been chaotic, raising fresh questions about its ability to run the oil exporting country effectively.
Despite support from NATO warplanes, government forces have struggled to capture Sirte, Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown and the biggest of the towns still outside their control.