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Red Cross stops Libya work after murder

The Red Cross has temporarily stopped work in Libya after one of its aid workers was shot at point-blank range by a gunman.

The body of a staff member of the Red Cross who was killed in Libya
The Red Cross has temporarily stopped work in Libya after a Swiss staffer was killed by gunmen. (AAP)

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The International Committee of the Red Cross says it is temporarily freezing its operations in Libya to assess the security situation after a Swiss staffer was killed by gunmen.

"We are freezing movement (of personnel) for the time being to analyse the situation so we can adapt our operations," ICRC spokesman David-Pierre Marquet told AFP, stressing there were no plans to permanently halt operations in Libya.

The announcement came a day after Michael Greub, a 42-year-old Swiss citizen heading the ICRC's office in Libya's third city Misrata, was killed by gunmen in Sirte, some 200km further along the coast.

Greub had been leaving a meeting with two colleagues when the attackers shot at their vehicle at "point-blank" range, ICRC spokesman Wolde Saugeron said on Wednesday.

"If our aid workers' lives are in danger, we have to try to adapt our structure, our way of working" to protect them, he said.

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The ICRC counts some 30 expatriate staff members and around 150 local staff in Libya.

Greub and his colleagues were not travelling in a marked vehicle, so it was unclear if ICRC was the intended target or if the attack was random, Marquet said.

"We're trying to understand why this happened," he said.


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