Plane carrying 150 Britons from Libya lands in UK
British special forces on standby to protect people stranded in Libya
A BP-chartered flight carrying 150 people from Libya has landed at Gatwick airport amid heavy criticism of government efforts to evacuate Britons trapped when Libyans rose up against Muammar Gaddafi.
The flight returned as it emerged that a number of British special forces, backed up by a reconnaissance unit, are on standby and primed to intervene to help protect Britons stranded in Libya. Whitehall sources confirmed the move to the Guardian, but defence officials would not say where the forces were based. One obvious location would be the RAF base in the UK sovereign base area at Akrotiri in Cyprus.
UK officials said they had not yet been ordered to be deployed to Libya and may not be needed.
The frigate HMS Cumberland was off Benghazi, Libya's second city, but not yet able to take people on board because of choppy seas, defence officials said.
An RAF Hercules transport aircraft has landed at Tripoli and another, based in Malta, is planning to fly to the Libyan capital.
Larger C17 aircraft based at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire are on standby to fly to Libya, according to defence sources.
The Hercules touched down in the Libyan capital as the first government-chartered plane sent to retrieve hundreds of stranded Britons was due to set off back to the UK.
The prime minister, who is in the Gulf, made a further call last night to the foreign secretary, William Hague, and the defence secretary, Liam Fox, to be briefed on the latest developments.
An official travelling with Cameron said permission was still being sought for HMS Cumberland to dock at Benghazi, where about 100 people are trying to get back to the UK.
Another 150 or so in the Libyan desert had been widely dispersed but were starting to gather together. The government was "considering a number of options" as to how they could be rescued, the official said, but would give no details.
"We are talking about additional planes landing but can not give any more information due to operational reasons," a spokesman said.
The government has come under criticism over its rescue operation, which was described as a fiasco after its first chartered rescue flight broke down at Gatwick and was delayed for 10 hours.
The 200-capacity Boeing 757 finally arrived in Tripoli in the early hours of this morning and was due to return to the UK in the coming hours.
The British Red Cross has deployed a team of volunteers to Gatwick to provide support to British nationals arriving home.
Hague, who has cancelled a planned trip to Washington to lead the response, said he would be launching a review into the delays.
"Given today's difficulties with reliably chartering private planes, I will establish a review, directly reporting to ministers, into the [Foreign and Commonwealth Office's] long-standing arrangements for aircraft evacuations," he said. "We need to know whether today was a coincidental series of unavoidable setbacks, or a systemic flaw."
As hundreds waited to leave the chaos-hit country, British nationals and shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander said the Foreign Office has taken too long to respond.
Hundreds of Britons have already left the country on commercial flights over past week or so, but many scheduled services have been cancelled in recent days.
One oil worker said yesterday that he and his colleagues had been left by the British embassy without protection.
James Coyle, who is based between Tripoli and second city, Benghazi, said: "We are living a nightmare and we have asked the British government and they have just totally ignored us.
"They don't reply to emails, they have cut off the! phones to Tripoli. We told them the situation three days ago they never even replied to us. We have been left without any protection whatsoever."
Other countries are also evacuating their citizens. The China Daily newspaper said more than 30,000 Chinese citizens were in Libya when the turmoil erupted. China's ambassador to Tunisia told the Xinhua news agency the embassy was arranging 30 buses to evacuate 2,900 citizens stranded at the Ras Jedir border checkpoint in Libya and would transport them to Girba, a Tunisian resort, before sending them home on chartered flights. Some 3,000 Turks boarded two ferries in Benghazi yesterday for Turkey.
President Barack Obama last night warned Gaddafi that he faces the prospect of international sanctions over violence against demonstrators, and condemned Gaddafi's actions as outrageous and unacceptable.
Obama is sending the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to Europe to discuss what actions can be taken to stop the violence, and to take part in a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The US president took care to maintain balance in his pronouncements over the uprisings in Egypt. By contrast, this statement was unequivocal in its criticism of Gaddafi's actions. Obama promised that the Libyan leader would be held accountable.
"The suffering and bloodshed is outrageous and it is unacceptable. So are threats and orders to shoot peaceful protesters and further punish the people of Libya. These actions violate international norms and every standard of common decency. This violence must stop," Obama said.
He broke his silence on Libya as US citizens in the country are preparing to be evacuated.
Signalling that he is considering sanctions, Obama said he had asked his administration for a list of options on how to respond to the crisis. "This includes those actions we may take and those we will coordinate with our allies and p! artners, or those that we will carry out through multilateral institutions," he said.
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