2 ships carry 3,000 Turks back home from Libya

Two Turkish ships evacuated 3,000 Turks from the chaos of Libya's popular uprising on Wednesday, but thousands of foreigners remained stranded at the country's main airport awaiting flights home.

"The airport was mobbed, you wouldn't believe the number of people," Kathleen Burnett, of Baltimore, Ohio, said Tuesday as she stepped off an Austrian Airlines flight from Tripoli to Vienna. "It was total chaos."

On Tuesday, British Airways and Emirates, the Middle East's largest airline, said they were canceling flights to Tripoli because of the violence there.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has urged his supporters to strike back against the Libyan protesters in an escalation of a crackdown that has led to widespread shooting in the streets. Nearly 300 people have been killed in the nationwide wave of anti-government protests.

The two Turkish commercial ships, which left from the Libyan port of Benghazi on Wednesday, are being escorted by a Turkish navy frigate, and the first one was expected to reach the Mediterranean port of Marmaris around midnight Wednesday, Turkey's Foreign Ministry said. Turkey dispatched another commercial ship to Libya early Wednesday.

Turkey has about 25,000 citizens and more than 200 companies involved in construction projects in Libya worth more than $15 billion. Some of the construction sites came under attack by protesters, but no Turkish citizen has been harmed, authorities said. Turkey has now evacuated more than 5,000 of its citizens from Libya, Turkey's Foreign Ministry said.

Unease over the safety of U.S. citizens intensified after attempts to get some of them out on Monday and Tuesday were unsuccessful.

Late Tuesday the U.S. State Department announced that American citizens would be evacuated from Libya by ferry to the Mediterranean island of Malta. In a notice sent to U.S. citizens in Libya late Tuesday, the department said Americans wishing to leave Libya in the government-chartered ferry should be at the As-shahab port in Tripoli with their passports starting at 9 a.m. local time Wednesday. The ferry will depart for Malta no later than 3 p.m. local time.

Elsewhere, Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman Christoph Prommersberger said a Dutch KDC-10 air force transport plane left Tripoli late Tuesday with 32 Dutch evacuees and 50 other nationalities.

"What we hear from our people is it is chaotic but functioning," he said of the Tripoli airport.

Britain said it was redeploying a warship, the HMS Cumberland, off the Libyan coast for a possible sea-borne evacuation of British citizens stuck in the north African country.

Libya is one of the world's biggest oil producers, and many oil companies also were evacuating their expat workers and their families.