The chief of Libya’s oil ministry fled to Tunisia over the weekend,

The chief of Libya’s oil ministry fled to Tunisia over the weekend, the Tunisian interior ministry said Tuesday, in a high-level defection that appeared to further isolate the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Shukri Ghanem at a news conference in early March.
The minister, Shukri Ghanem, the chairman of Libya’s National Oil Corporation and a former prime minister, arrived in Tunisia on Saturday, according to Néji Zairi, a spokesman for the Tunisian Interior Ministry.

In Tripoli, Moussa Ibrahim, the chief government spokesman, said that Mr. Ghanem had been in Tunisia “on official business,” and that the government had lost touch with him since he left the capital over the weekend.

But Mr. Ibrahim added that the government’s struggle against a rebel uprising “doesn’t depend on individuals, even if they are high-ranking officials,” appearing to suggest that the Qaddafi government knew that Mr. Ghanem had defected. Moussa Koussa, who was the foreign minister, defected in March. .

NATO airstrikes, meanwhile, continued to pound targets around the capital. News agencies also reported rockets landing across the Libyan border in southern Tunisia, near a desert area where Qaddafi forces and rebels have clashed.

There have been growing signs that the air strikes are wearing down the government’s ability to fight. With no air defenses, Tripoli has resorted to a propaganda campaign asserting that NATO has killed thousands of innocent civilians.

But that campaign has faltered, with the government’s tours of the sites of airstrikes in Tripoli failing to show convincingly that there have been any significant numbers of civilian casualties.

That failure has fed a growing sense of frustration among officials, who have seemed determined to convey that NATO is engaged, not in a campaign to degrade the Qaddafi government’s fighting ability, but in willful brutality against ordinary Libyans.

On Monday, officials tied to the Qaddafi government threatened to post “human shields” at telecommunications sites under threat of NATO bombing, borrowing a page from Saddam Hussein’s old playbook.

The statement followed warnings from Britain’s top general, who was quoted as saying that NATO would have to broaden its bombing campaign to include infrastructure targets in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from “clinging to power.”

Barely 36 hours after The Sunday Telegraph in London published its interview with Gen. Sir David Richards, Britain’s chief of the defense staff, foreign reporters in Tripoli were summoned to a news conference at which Libyan telecommunication officials announced that they would deploy human shields.

The use of human shields was a major feature of Iraq’s response to Western threats of military force after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Mr. Hussein had Western businessmen taken to oil installations and other potential targets around Baghdad, but most were released under diplomatic pressure before the brief war that ousted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991.

The most explicit warning that human shields could be used in Libya came from Mohammed Almaremi, the chief of one of Libya’s two cellphone companies, both controlled by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi’s son and, until the rebel uprising, his expected political heir.

Mr. Almaremi said that 20,000 employees of Libyana, one of the companies, would disperse to telecommunications sites along with 20,000 members of their families, to remain there as long as the bombing continued.

“We will be human shields to face any aggression,” he said.

Mohammed ben Ayad, head of the Libyan telecommunications authority, said NATO attacks had already destroyed large parts of the country’s telecommunications network, disrupting hospitals, schools and other civilian enterprises.

Mr. Ayad said the network, one of the most advanced in the Arab world, had already suffered more than $1 billion in damage from NATO raids. In a PowerPoint display, he pinpointed areas that had taken the heaviest hits, including several in and near Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, on the Mediterranean coast.

“From now on, employees and their families will act as human armor to protect these locations,” one slide said in English.

Some of the anger that Qaddafi loyalists have directed at the West since NATO began its airstrikes in March has drawn on a belief that Colonel Qaddafi made major efforts to prove himself a friend of the West in the past decade. He abandoned Libya’s programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons, and opened the country to a rush of Western investment in oil, telecommunications and other sectors.