As many as 1,000 people have likely been killed in Libya as leader Muammar Gaddafi cracks down on protests against his rule, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said on Wednesday.

"We have no complete information about the number of people that have died," Frattini told reporters in Rome. "We believe that the estimates of about 1,000 are credible."
He said his understanding from the Italian embassy in Tripoli was that the eastern Libyan region of Cyrenaica was no longer under Gaddafi's control.