GENEVA - The United Nations aid chief said on Friday that floods in Libya that have killed thousands of people in its worst natural disaster in modern history were due to the collision of "climate and capacity".

"In Libya, where access to Derna is still so difficult, where there are the compounding problems of the dam breaking, as well as the storm breaking from the sea, this is a tragedy in which climate and capacity has collided," Martin Griffiths told a U.N. briefing in Geneva.

He said that the U.N. humanitarian office had sent a disaster coordination team of 15 people who had been redeployed from Morocco which suffered an earthquake last week. REUTERS