Libya: 675/1125 kHz now in the hands of protestors

The English and French websites of the Libyan Jamahiriya Broadcasting Corporation (LJBC) have not been updated since Thursday 17 February. However the LJBC Arabic website has been updated today. It claims that President Gaddafi has received messages of support by telephone from the presidents of Senegal and Guinea.

According to Tarek Zeidan reporting from Denmark to Glenn Hauser’s DX Listening Digest, the high power mediumwave transmitter at El Beida is now in the hands of the protestors, and was heard last night around 2245 UTC identifying itself in Arabic as Radio Free Libya from the Green Mountain. Tarek says that other Libyan stations he could hear at the same time appeared to be pro-Gaddafi songs, and at 0630 UTC this morning 1449 and 675 kHz were re-broadcasting the speech of the president’s son Saifulislam Gaddafi.

The Foreign Policy blog refers to the Internet site http://libya.blog-video.tv/ and refers to it as a radio station called ‘Radio Free Benghazi’ with ‘breathless amateur announcers’. In fact, that site seems to be a chat facility enabling protestors to speak to each other, and as far as I know this is not the material being broadcast on 1125 kHz. It was in operation before protestors took over the LJBC facility. But since I only speak a few words of Arabic, I am willing to stand corrected.

A good source of breaking news for those of us who don’t speak Arabic is the 17th February 2011 blog. I saw some video on Al Jazeera last night attributed to this source. Unfortunately this does not automatically refresh, but is constantly updated. I tried following events on Twitter, but there are too many time-wasters posting information that’s hours old, or simply irrelevant.

My RNW colleague Ehard Goddijn has also found a live stream feed from the same people who produce the 17th February blog. This also appears to be a chat room using Skype. I heard some English as well as Arabic.

Update: Tarek Zeidan later reports: listening to 1125 The voice of Free Libya , they just announced that “you can tune in to our transmission on 1125 as the Voice of Free Libya , also you can pick Radio Free Libya from Benghazi on 675″ so some kind of cooperation is going on between these 2 stations now

just a bit of a difference in the ID now :

• 1125: Idhaat sout Libya al Hurra - Voice of Free Libya radio
• 675: Idhaat Libya al Hurra - Free Libya Radio

around 19:30 UTC and both 675 and 1125 are silent. (DX Listening Digest)