No fewer than 150 people have been killed in the Mediterranean storm that swept through eastern Libya on Sunday and Monday.
Images filmed by residents of the disaster area showed massive mudslides, collapsed buildings and entire neighbourhoods submerged under water.
A spokesman for the Benghazi-based administration in Libya, Mohamed Massoud, on Monday, said massive materials owned by both private and public entities were damaged.
“At least 150 people were killed as a result of flooding and torrential rains left by storm Daniel in Derna, the Jabal al-Akhdar region and the suburbs of Al-Marj.
“This is besides the massive material damage that struck public and private properties,” he added.
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He said the prime minister of the east-based government, Oussama Hamad, and the head of a rescue committee as well as other ministers had travelled to Derna to evaluate the extent of the damage.
Hamad’s government — which rivals a UN-brokered, internationally recognised transitional administration in Tripoli — on Monday declared Derna a “disaster area”.
Experts have described storm Daniel — which also struck parts of Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria in recent days, killing at least 27 people — as “extreme in terms of the amount of water falling in a space of 24 hours”.
