PARIS - Laurent Gbagbo is negotiating his surrender after forces loyal to Cote d'Ivoire's presidential claimant Alassane Ouattara launched a major assault on the presidential palace on Tuesday, Ouattara's ambassador in Paris said.

"He (Gbagbo) is in the process (of negotiating) to see how he could hand himself over," Ally Coulibaly, said on France's i-Tele television.

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Coulibaly, a close ally of Ouattara, added that Gbagbo was still in Abidjan.

"Abidjan has become a place full of rumours and I don't want to add to the disinformation," he told RFI radio earlier on Tuesday. "What I have learnt though is that since yesterday he is looking to negotiate."

Coulibaly, who said he could not guarantee the truth of the information which come from an unidentified source, could not immediately be reached by Reuters.

Toussaint Alain, Gbagbo's adviser in Paris, denied Gbagbo was planning to give himself up.

"He is alive, has not been captured and has no intention to surrender," Alain told Reuters. "He is at the head of state's residence in Abidjan.

Gbagbo has defied international pressure to give up the presidency of the cocoa growing country after an election in November that UN-certified results showed Ouattara won. At least 1,500 people have died in the standoff since.

Gbagbo has rejected the results, claiming fraud, and accused the United Nations of bias.

The UN peacekeeping force in Cote d'Ivoire, supported by the French military, targeted Gbagbo's heavy weapons capabilities with attack helicopters on Monday after civilians were killed in shelling in recent days.

Alain said Gbagbo remained at the residency after a night of bombing and that Gbagbo's military capacity had been weakened.

"He remains at his post facing this coup d'etat because we have to call it a coup d'etat by France on Gbagbo." Alain said.

He said the palace was defended by the army, but the biggest damage had been to military camps and that the "military capacity had been virtually wiped out."