Turkish Airlines, the last remaining foreign carrier offering flights to Libya, said Tuesday it was suspending all flights to the conflict-wracked country amid the worsening security situation.

The Turkish flag-carrier said that it had suspended flights to Misrata, its only remaining destination in the country after it had earlier pulled its flights to the capital Tripoli as well as Benghazi and the inland desert city of Sebha.

Verging on full-blown civil war, Libya may pose an even greater threat to Europe than jihadists in Iraq and Syria, yet the international community has few tools to help resolve the crisis.

Three years after NATO intervened to help overthrow Moammar Gadhafi's regime, two rival governments claim his mantle and a rash of heavily armed militias fight for territory and oilfields.

Thirteen Egyptian Christians held in Libya have been freed, a tribal leader said on Monday after government sources reported they had been abducted by Islamist militants.

However, Muftah Marzuq, head of the council of elders in the coastal city of Sirte, insisted that the 13 had not been kidnapped, but had been detained by people smugglers.

Libya's internationally recognized government on Monday appealed for weapons to combat militias which have seized parts of the oil-rich but conflict-wracked nation, at an emergency meeting of the Arab League.

"We call on the international community to assume its legal and moral responsibilities and to arm, without further delay, the Libyan army," said Libya's representative to the Cairo-based Arab League, Ashur Bou Rashed.

Libya's internationally recognized government said Monday that its aircraft bombed an oil tanker off the Islamist-held port of Derna, killing two crewmen and drawing condemnation from Greece.

A spokesman for the Libyan government's armed forces said the tanker was hit on Sunday after it refused to stop for checks on its cargo which had raised suspicions.

President Francois Hollande said Monday that France would not intervene unilaterally in Libya and urged the international community to take action to stem the deepening crisis in the country.

"We are acting to contain terrorism in the south, but France will not intervene in Libya because it's for the international community to live up to its responsibilities," Hollande told French radio.

Arab League ambassadors will meet on Monday to discuss the deepening conflict in Libya, the bloc's deputy secretary general Ahmed Ben Helli said.

The meeting at the Cairo-based League was requested by Libya's internationally recognized government, which is battling Islamist-backed militias, and supported by its two leading regional backers, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Islamist militants have abducted 20 Egyptian Christians in Libya in recent days, a source close to the government said Saturday.

The Ansar al-Sharia militia had kidnapped 13 of them Saturday in the coastal city of Sirte and the rest of them there over the past few days, the source said.  

Fires at seven storage tanks at one of Libya's main oil terminal have been put out, officials said Friday, nine days after they were set off by a militia rocket.

A rocket fired on December 25 by Fajr Libya (Libya Dawn), a coalition of Islamist-backed fighters, ignited the first fire which then spread to six other tanks at al-Sidra oil terminal.

A solution to the crisis in Libya is not possible without an international intervention, the president of neighboring Niger said Friday.

"I do not see how the armed terrorist militias can create the conditions for reconciliation among Libyans," said President Mahamadou Issoufou.