LIBYAN REBELS, BACKED forcefully by European leaders, rejected a ceasefire proposal by African mediators today because it did not insist Moammar Gaddafi relinquish power.

Despite an earlier announcement that the Libyan leader had accepted the truce, his forces shelled a key rebel-held city and killed six people, a doctor said.

“Colonel Gaddafi and his sons must leave immediately if he wants to save himself,” said Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, head of the rebels’ leadership council. “If not, the people are coming for him.”

Even as the African Union delegation arrived in the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi, crowds of protesters gathered to demonstrate their opposition to any deal-making while Gaddafi remains in power. They said they had little faith in the visiting African Union mediators, most of them allies of Gaddafi. Three of the five African leaders who came preaching democracy for Libya seized power in coups.

Abdul-Jalil, a former justice minister who split with Gaddafi and leads the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council, said the proposal “did not respond to the aspirations of the Libyan people” and only involved political reforms.

The AU sought a suspension of three weeks of international airstrikes on Gaddafi’s forces, that have prevented them from overpowering the vastly weaker rebel forces.

Gaddafi’s forces, meanwhile, attacked the rebel-held city of Misrata and its Mediterranean port with artillery fire, despite the African Union delegation’s assurance that Gaddafi had accepted their ceasefire plan at a meeting late Sunday in Tripoli. A doctor who lives in the city said the shelling began overnight and continued intermittently throughout the day today.

He said six people, one of them a 3-year-old girl, were killed by missiles that slammed into residential areas. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation if he was discovered by Gaddafi’s forces.

Wary of Gaddafi’s earlier broken ceasefire pledges, European officials supported the rebels’ refusal to negotiate until Gaddafi and his powerful sons and associates are gone.

Benghazi

More than 1,000 protesters in Benghazi waved the pre-Gaddafi flags that have come to symbolize the rebel movement and chanted slogans against Gaddafi, whose more than 40-year rule has been threatened by the uprising that began nearly two months ago.

NATO airstrikes hit Gaddafi tanks yesterday, helping the rebels push back government troops who had been advancing toward Benghazi on an east-west highway along the country’s northern Mediterranean coast.

The airstrikes largely stopped heavy shelling by government forces of the eastern city of Ajdabiya — a critical gateway to Benghazi, the opposition’s de facto capital and Libya’s second largest city.

Today, rebels held positions at the western gates of the city, on the fringes of desert littered with bullet casings, scraps of metal and more than a dozen blackened or overturned vehicles, including tanks and pickup trucks outfitted with anti-aircraft guns.

The area was also scattered with twisted cooking pots, torn blankets and a shredded green helmet smeared with blood.

A rebel scout sent down the highway to the west said he encountered Gaddafi forces and was drawn into a brief gunbattle before falling back to Ajdabiya, but there were no major battles on that front today.

- AP