TRIPOLI: Russia believes Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi should quit and could help broker his departure, a senior Russian official said Friday in an important boost to NATO powers keen on ending his 41-year rule.
It was a striking change in tone from Kremlin criticism of NATO airstrikes in Libya, which are officially intended to protect civilians in a civil war but have effectively put the West on the side of rebels seeking Gadhafi’s removal.
NATO said it was preparing to deploy attack helicopters over the Arab North African state for the first time to add to the pressure on Gadhafi’s forces on the ground.

But his security forces demonstrated once again that they are far from a spent force, launching rocket attacks overnight on the rebel-held town of Zintan and fighting insurgents on the outskirts of the city of Misrata.
The Russian mediation offer was announced on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit in Deauville, France, where Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was among the heads of state in attendance.

“Colonel Gadhafi has deprived himself of legitimacy with his actions. We should help him leave,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in Deauville.
He said Russia would use dialogue with the Libyan authorities to “help Mr. Gadhafi take the right decision.”
Medvedev said later Russia would not give Gaddafi shelter but that others might. He said he was sending an envoy to Libya to begin talks.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said in Deauville that the deployment of British helicopters was part of a new phase in NATO’s operations in Libya.
“Now there are signs that the momentum against Gadhafi is really building. So it is right that we are ratcheting up the military, the economic and the political pressure,” Cameron told a news conference.

Rebel-held Misrata, scene of some of the fiercest battles in the three-month-old conflict, was hit by a second day of heavy fighting on its western outskirts.
A Reuters reporter said he could see white puffs of smoke and dust from where mortars fired by pro-Gadhafi forces were landing.
The insurgents responded by firing back with rockets and heavy machine guns, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Greatest) after each volley.

Doctors at Misrata’s hospital said three rebels were killed and 16 wounded in the fighting Friday.
“We are being attacked from all sides with rockets, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and mortars,” said insurgent Faraj al-Mistiri, 36. “They are trying their hardest to get back into Misrata.”
The World Health Organization said the fighting in Misrata had been killing an estimated 12 people a day, though casualties had declined after fighting eased in the past week.
The WHO did not give a total figure, but its daily estimate would mean a total of about 925 killed over the 77 days of intense fighting in Misrata.

Gadhafi’s forces intensified attacks on the town of Zintan, near the border with Tunisia, where rebels have been holding off assaults for months.
A foreign doctor in Zintan, about 150 kilometers southwest of Tripoli, said the town came under intense rocket fire overnight from pro-Gadhafi forces positioned to the east.
“There must have been about a hundred [strikes]. I wasn’t counting, but there were four or five rockets every half an hour or 15 minutes,” Anja Wolz of Doctors Without Borders said.
Wolz said it was a “miracle” no one had been seriously hurt.
“Zintan is emptying, people are leaving,” she said by telephone.

The rebel administration in Benghazi is trying to present itself as a credible government-in-waiting. That effort was helped Friday when Farhad Omar Bin Guidara, who was Libya’s Central Bank governor until he left the country in February, told Al-Arabiya television he was now was working with the rebel finance team.
Amnesty International said scores of young men in the mountains of western Libya have disappeared at the hands of forces loyal to Gadhafi.
The human rights group’s 18-page report was produced after a fact-finding mission to neighboring Tunisia, where many refugees from the Nafusa region have fled since conflict erupted in Libya in February.