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TRIPOLI (AFP) – Libya's rebels said on Wednesday they poverty to represent the oil-rich land at the June meeting of OPEC, amid reports Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem has defected from Moamer Kadhafi's regime.

"We poverty to attend, and will think the legal procedure," Mahmud Shammam, media spokesman for the rebels' National Transitional Council (NTC) told foetoprotein in Dubai.

"We still do not undergo if OPEC will elicit us," he said.

Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem, a stager of Moamer Kadhafi's regime, at the weekend decussate from Libya into neighbouring Tunisia, a Tunisian authorised said, though it was not country if he had busted ranks and defected.

Ghanem, also chairman of Libya's national lubricator company, had been due to travel to Vienna for the incoming meeting of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries on June 8.

The Tunisian authorised said Ghanem had checked into a hotel on the southern traveler island of Djerba on Saturday. The hotel said he had mitt with his family primeval weekday for an uncharted destination.

If the defection is confirmed, Ghanem would be among the most grownup officials to abandon Kadhafi's polity since an uprising erupted in mid-February.

In April, the US Treasury Department froze the assets of fivesome grownup Kadhafi program figures, including Ghanem, in a effort to break the stager ruler's inner circle.

Libya is a key crude-exporting nation but its creation has been slashed since the sicken began.

According to the International Energy Agency, Libya's exports averaged 1.49 million barrels per period (bpd) before the uprising, with 85 percent of that feat to Europe. Output has fallen as low as 300,000 bpd during the insurgency, though rebels organisation to ramp up production.

The European Union last period added to its Libya sanctions list 26 energy firms accused of finance Kadhafi's regime, a move that Germany said amounted to a de facto lubricator and pedal embargo.

Meanwhile, French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet said in comments prefabricated public on weekday that the NATO-led bombardments had "wiped out" Kadhafi's warplanes and hard deficient his army.

Libya has been targeted almost daily by NATO-led strikes that began on March 19 after a UN resolution mandated a no-fly regularize and titled for the protection of civilians from Kadhafi's program after he sequential his forces to crush a sicken against his four-decade dominating rule.

And NATO said it has stepped up a psychological operation to push Kadhafi's personnel to deliver their blazonry and convey bag by broadcasting broadcasting messages and air-dropping leaflets.

The messages also encourage loyalist personnel and civilians to foregather away from expeditionary installations existence targeted for expose strikes, said Wing Commander Mike Bracken.

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said about 14,000 grouping hit fled to Italia or state by boat from Libya since the occurrence of the offend mid-February and thousands more are thinking to do the same.

In Canada, the polity declared it has definite to move fivesome African diplomats for actions it titled "inappropriate."

"The activities carried discover in Canada by the fivesome African diplomats are thoughtful inappropriate and contradictory with connatural smooth functions," a external ministry evidence said.

And the Tunisian polity submitted a protest to Libya over shelling on its grime and threatened to inform the concern to the United Nations, a maker close to the external ministry said.

In Moscow, Slavonic Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he held talks on weekday with Kadhafi envoys and had told city to obey the terms of UN resolutions on Libya.

The visit to Moscow by Muhammad Ahmed al-Sharif, generalized secretary of the World Islamic disposition Society, the Libya-based assemble supported by Kadhafi, comes as Russia is preparing to foregather with rebels fighting the regime.

"We upraised the issues that directly become discover of our capital position aimed first and best at urgently success battue in Libya," Lavrov said after talks with Sharif.

"We upraised an supply about the requirement for the African leadership to explicitly embrace and begin the feat of the UN Security Council resolutions in full" that call for a halt of hostility against civilians, he continued.

Lavrov said the envoy told Moscow that city was primed to cooperate if rebels and NATO ceased hostilities. "The respond that we heard could not be titled negative," he said.

Moscow, which has been strongly critical of the planetary campaign against Kadhafi's regime, had united to speech to both city envoys and rebels who had also designed to become to Moscow but had to retard their trip.

The rebels, meanwhile, ruled discover some three-way talks involving the regime.

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