Governments scrambled by air and sea to pick up their citizens stranded by Libya's bloody unrest, with thousands of people crowding the airport to await evacuation and Egyptians gathering at the border to escape the chaos.
"The airport was mobbed, you wouldn't believe the number of people," said Kathleen Burnett, of Baltimore, Ohio, as she stepped off an Austrian Airlines flight from Tripoli to Vienna yesterday.
"It was total chaos. Everybody was being checked out by the police but everyone was very obedient."
The US State Department said it will begin evacuating American citizens from Libya by ferry to the Mediterranean island of Malta today.
In a notice sent to US citizens in Libya yesterday, the department said Americans wishing to leave Libya in a government-chartered ferry should be at the As-shahab port in Tripoli with their passports starting at 9 am local time today.
The ferry will depart for Malta no later than 3 pm local time. At least two airlines, British Airways and Emirates, the Middle East's largest, said they were cancelling flights to Tripoli, as reports spread that bodies of protesters littered the streets of neighbourhoods in the capital.
Britain said it was redeploying a warship, the HMS Cumberland, off the Libyan coast in readiness for a possible sea-borne evacuation of British citizens stuck in the north African country.
Two civilian ferries from Turkey arrived in the hard-hit eastern city of Benghazi yesterday to evacuate about 3,000 Turkish citizens, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The ferries were expected to set sail back for Turkey as soon as the evacuees had boarded. Turkey sent the ferries and another military vessel after the country was unable to get permission to land at the city's airport.
Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek said Turkish ferries could help evacuate up to 6,000 people per day, if Libyan authorities allow the vessels to dock at Benghazi.
Meanwhile, about 5,000 Egyptians have returned home from Libya by land and about 10,000 more are waiting to cross the Libya-Egypt border, an Egyptian security official said. Egypt says it will also send six commercial and two military planes to repatriate thousands more caught in the revolt against Moammar Gadhafi's regime.
