A
car bomb explosion outside a hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi has wounded dozens
of people and killed up to as many as 15, though the exact number of those dead is not
yet clear.
It is believed to be the first such attack to target civilians since the death of the
former leader Colonel Gadaffi more than a year and a half ago.
It might be the first bomb to target civilians specifically but there have been a number
of attacks on diplomatic targets.
There was a fatal attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi last September in which the US
ambassador Chris Stevens was killed.
And more recently there was a car bomb attack outside the French embassy in the capital
of Tripoli.
But such attacks are just one of the many problems facing Libya in the difficult transition
between bloody revolution and a peaceful democracy.
There's also a growing Islamist movement in the country fueled in part by fighters fleeing
from Northern Mali.
The groups who were rejected by Timbuktu by the French-led war have now crossed the Sahara
desert and ended several North African countries including Libya.
Combined with the ultra Salafist groups who were blamed for the attack on the US embassy,
they've been destroying ancient Sufi shrines, harassing women, and intimidating civilians
and then there's the power of the armed militias.
The weapons that were used in the fight against Gadaffi haven't just disappeared since his
death and neither have the people who fought him.
Just recently armed groups stormed the justice and foreign ministries in Tripoli and told
the government they wouldn't leave until a law was passed banning senior Gadaffi-era
officials from current government positions.
And that law was passed.
A few months ago Tripoli was also named one of the top ten worse cities in the world to
live in but is Tripoli and Libya really that bad?
We spoke to Libyan's from Benghazi and Tripoli to find out more about life after Gadaffi.
"Life in general is back to normal almost.
We're back to our old jobs, back to our business, back to daily life."
"The security situation is not great, not at all.
The power is actually to the people who've got the weapons at the moment.
That's becoming quite frustrating."
"You can go out from morning to late at night it's pretty peaceful.
We do have an abundance of rifles on the ground but I'll tell you ever since we marked our
one year anniversary of the revolution we don't see guns on the street as much."
"We can't deny that there are some extremists but we don't see their effects daily in the
street.
Lots of the Islamist groups have joined the normal democracy process.
I don't see their threats.
Even the which people think some of them are part of al-Qaeda, now they're doing a lot
of charity work and they do campaigns against drugs, they do free clinics for poor people.
So they're already in the civil society work now."
"There are definitely Jihadist activities or extremist activities in Libya, especially
in Benghazi.
These groups have almost no support in Libya, they only have the people who believe in their
ideology somewhat but many Libyans are moderate by nature, they're Muslims and they don't
like anyone to impose Islam on them and the proof in that results from the election."
"There are people who have maybe more rigid, more extremist beliefs.
What I do see when I flick through the channels when I want news from different news outlets.
I do see an exaggeration of this."
"The French revolution took more than ten years for the country to settle down.
From what I see, what's happening right now, is very normal because we had an armed revolution."
"There is obviously the expectations of the ordinary life are high and it's only expected
in our transitional period, they're expecting a lot and specially up to the collapse of
a machine, they expect a lot of things to improve but naturally these improvements are
not going to come over night, they aren't going happen, it will take years for things
to start to actually improve.