The Libyan Red Crescent put the death toll at more than 11,000 people, with nearly 20,000 still missing, in the highest estimate yet from an official source. It said almost 2,000 bodies had been swept into the sea by the floods.
Officials including the mayor, Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi, in the port city of Derna, which has been worst affected by the floods, believe 20,000 people may have died. At least 5,500 people have been confirmed dead.
Many have been buried in mass graves, but one of the chief shortages in the city, apart from drinking water, is body bags required to prevent disease spreading from unburied bodies. Rescue teams have now been able to enter the city and are scouring rubble and ruins left by the floods.
The call for the inquiry came separately from both sides of a country divided between rival eastern and western administrations: Libya's presidential council chair, Mohamed al-Menfi, in the east, and the interim prime minister of the Tripoli-based government, Abdul Hamid Dabaiba. Menfi said he wanted the inquiry "to hold accountable everyone who made a mistake or neglected by abstaining or taking actions that resulted in the collapse of the city's dams".
Libya has been riven by parallel administrations for years, but the attorney general, Al-Siddiq Al-Sour, is one of the few officials left whose writ supposedly runs across the country.
A groundswell of anger is building over whether warnings about the state of the two dams were ignored, the failure to find new contractors to maintain the dam after Libya's 2011 civil war and the precise instructions issued by the police and security directorate on the night of the flood.
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