Egypt's ambassador and his staff have left Libya for security reasons after the kidnapping of five of their colleagues, the foreign ministry said Sunday.

"The ambassador and more than 50 staff and diplomats of the Egyptian embassy left Tripoli on Saturday evening," ministry spokesman Saeed Lassoued told AFP.

Two weeks of ethnic clashes in Libya's main southern city Sebha have killed at least 88 people and wounded more than 130, the city's hospital director said on Saturday.

"Between the outbreak of the fighting on January 11 and Friday evening, the number of dead totaled 88," Abdallah Ouheida told Agence France Presse.

Kidnappers seized Egypt's cultural attache and three other embassy staff in the Libyan capital on Saturday a day after a group snatched another Egyptian official in the city.

Meanwhile, the toll from clashes in the south and west rose to 154 dead and 463 wounded, a further sign of the chronic instability that has plagued Libya since the 2011 uprising ousted dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Kidnappers seized an Egyptian diplomat in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Friday, Libya's foreign ministry said.

The diplomat was snatched from his house in Tripoli by an unknown group, Libyan foreign ministry spokesman Said Lassoued told Agence France Presse.

The U.S. military's partnership with France in Africa is "indispensable" in the fight against extremist groups in the Sahel region, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Friday.

During a visit to Washington, Le Drian said "terrorist groups are circulating across the whole Sahara-Sahel area and terrorist acts could put our own security at risk."

A tug of war between Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan and Islamist ministers threatens to further paralyze a government already weakened by growing unrest in the North African country.

The latest row erupted when the Justice and Construction Party (JCP), political arm of the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, withdrew its five ministers from Zeidan's 32-member government.

Violence in Libya killed 643 people last year, amid a sharp rise in crime, according to a parliamentary report that laments a lack of effective policing in the increasingly lawless North African country.

Excerpts of a report by the internal affairs committee of the General National Congress did not give comparative figures for deaths in 2012 nor data on crimes committed.

A South Korean trade official who was kidnapped in Libya has been freed three days after he was taken hostage by armed men, a report said Thursday.

Han Seok-Woo, the head of the Libya unit of the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), was freed Wednesday by Libyan gunmen who were then arrested, Yonhap news agency reported, citing an official.

At least five people were killed and around 20 wounded as armed groups clashed in a western suburb of the Libyan capital on Tuesday, a medical source said.

A security source said the violence broke out during an operation against "armed gangs" including backers of Moammar Gadhafi's regime, ousted in a 2011 revolt.

Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan vowed Tuesday to stay at his post, and Islamist ministers later quit his government in protest at persistent lawlessness that saw him briefly abducted last year.

Zeidan accused the Justice and Construction Party -- the political arm of the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that has been bloodily repressed in neighboring Egypt since the ouster of elected president Mohammed Morsi -- of seeking to destabilize his government.