Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that they invited Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi to pay a visit to Turkey, Anadolu reported.
Erdogan attended the Turkey-Libya Business Forum at the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli as part of his official visit to Libya.
He said at the forum, "Turkey aims at increasing number of its embassies in the African continent to 27 by the end of next year. We believe that Libya will support us in this process. We attach great importance to Libya's pioneering and leading role in Africa."
"Despite the global financial crisis, trade volume between Turkey and Libya rose 40 percent to 1.4 billion USD. This is quite meaningful. We expect this amount to further increase to 2 billion by the end of 2009. We target to increase our trade volume with Libya up to 10 billion USD in the next five years. Therefore, we want to sign a free trade agreement with Libya in the first half of 2010," he said.
Erdogan said that they were planning to increase number of Turkish Airlines (THY) flights between Istanbul and Tripoli up to 14 in a week.