As Nato insisted there would be no let-up in its air war despite Italian calls for a cessation, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, said he did not fear death and defiantly vowed to fight "to the beyond,"

"We will resist and the battle will continue to the beyond, until you're wiped out. But we will not be finished," Gaddafi said in an audio message broadcast on Libyan television late on Wednesday.

"There's no longer any agreement after you killed our children and our grandchildren ... You (the West) can move back," the strongman said in homage to his comrade Khuwildi Hemidi, several members of whose family were killed Monday in Nato raids on his residence.

"We are not frightened. We are not trying to live or escape," Gaddafi said, denouncing what we called a crusade against a Muslim country targeting civilians and children.

Nato, reversing an initial denial, acknowledged its warplanes early on Monday carried out strikes in the Sorman area, 70 kilometres (45 miles) from Tripoli, but said its warplanes bombed a "high-level" command and control node.

Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said 15 people, including three children, were killed in the attack, which he slammed as a "cowardly terrorist act which cannot be justified."

Ibrahim said the attack was on an estate belonging to Hemidi, a veteran comrade of Gaddafi.

"By what right do you target politicians and their families?" Kadhafi asked in the message. He claimed that Hemidi's office in Tripoli had been bombed four times.

"They were looking for him because he's a hero. When they didn't find him in his office they wanted to kill him in his home," Gaddafi added, calling on the United Nations to send observers to confirm that the Nato target was a civilian site and not a military target.

Gaddafi promised to build a monument; "the highest in North Africa," to four-year-old Khaleda, Hemidi's granddaughter who the authorities said was killed in the raid.

"We will stay, we will resist and we will not give in. Strike with your missiles, two, three, 10 or 100 years."

His message came hours after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato chief, vowed there would be no halt to the Libyan bombing campaign, saying more civilians would die if operations were not maintained under a UN mandate to protect Libyans from the exactions of Gaddafi's regime.

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