The protesters demanded that Derna's council be dissolved and the city's recovery be entrusted to international companies, the newspaper said. They also called for opening an investigation into those who ran the city before the flood, it added. The protesters reportedly set on fire the house of Derna mayor Abdulmenam Al-Ghaithi.
Osama Hammad, head of the parliament-appointed Libyan government based in Sirt, has dissolved the Derna council and ordered an investigation into its members in connection with the floods, the newspaper said.
Earlier in the day, the head of the Libyan Red Crescent organization, Abdulsalam Al-Haj, refuted in an interview with Sputnik UN data that flooding in eastern Libya claimed the lives of 11,000 people.
"I don’t know where the United Nations got this false information from. We have not announced such numbers to anyone, and we do not know anything about it. There is no confirmed data on the number of victims yet, and the search for survivors in the city of Derna is still ongoing," Al-Haj said.
On Sunday, Khaled Masoud al-Mudir, the justice minister of the parliament-appointed government, told Sputnik that Libyan authorities would conduct an investigation and prosecute those whose negligence had caused dams to collapse in Derna during heavy rains if they are proven guilty.
Torrential rains hit Libya on September 10, brought by Storm Daniel. They caused destructive flooding in the country's east, where the cities of Susah and Derna were declared natural disaster zones. The death toll is at thousands and continues rising as thousands more are still missing.