Two years after the death of Libyan dictator, Muammar
Gaddafi, a chamber where he raped girls and boys as young as 14 years
old has been discovered.
Read the sad story below
The full horror of his brutality has been slow to emerge, with many
Libyans still fearing retaliation by those who continue to be loyal to
their late leader. But it can now be revealed that the most
heartbreaking of Gaddafi’s victims include hundreds, possibly thousands
of teenage girls who, throughout his 42-year reign, were beaten, raped
and forced to become his sex slaves.
Many were virgins kidnapped from schools and universities and kept
prisoner for years in a specially designed secret sex lair hidden within
Tripoli University or his many palaces. In the 26 months since he was
deposed, Gaddafi’s den – where he regularly raped girls as young as 14 –
has remained locked. But today its gaudy interior, where the colonel
brutalised his victims, can be seen for the first time in photographs
from a hard-hitting BBC4 documentary.
Inside the small, nondescript single-storey complex, the girls were
forced to watch pornography to ‘educate’ them for their degrading
treatment at the hands of Gaddafi. And even those who did manage to
escape were often shunned by their deeply religious Muslim families who
believed their family honour had been tainted.
When the dictator’s body was dragged through the streets by a baying
mob, just hours after he was beaten and shot in the head, the hastily
convened transitional government moved swiftly to seal off the sex
dungeon. They feared the full extent of Gaddafi’s debased and lewd
lifestyle would horrify the Western world and cause deep embarrassment
to Libya.
One of the rooms holds little more than a double bed, lit by an
orange lamp. Its 1970s decor and grimy Jacuzzi – all left exactly as
they were when Gaddafi last used it – give it a seedy and gloomy air.
But even more chilling is the clinical gynaecological suite in an
adjoining room. It was here, on two beds fitted with stirrups behind a
table laden with surgical instruments, that Gaddafi’s young victims were
examined to ensure they had no sexually transmittable diseases. And
here they were forced to undergo abortions if they became pregnant.
This is the fully-fitted gynecological suite where young girls would
be placed in one of the two beds and checked for STDs before they were
sent in to the waiting dictator
They, however, were the lucky ones. Other young victims were so badly
abused that they were dumped in car parks and on waste ground, and left
to die.Gaddafi’s modus operandi was to tour schools and universities
where female students were invited to his lectures.
As he spoke before his hushed audience, he would silently scan the
room seeking out attractive girls. Before leaving he would pat those he
had ‘selected’ on the head.
Within hours his private bodyguards would round up those chosen and
kidnap them. If their families tried to keep them from Gaddafi’s
clutches, they were gunned down.
One teacher at a Tripoli school recalled how the girls were all very
young. ‘Some were only 14,’ she said. ‘They would simply take the girl
they wanted. They had no conscience, no morals, not an iota of mercy
even though she was a mere child.’
One mother, whose daughter was a student, said the community around
Tripoli University lived in fear when a visit from the colonel was
announced. ‘The girls he wanted would be rounded up and sent to him,’
she said.
‘One just disappeared and they never found her again, despite her
father and brothers searching for her. Another was found three months
later, cut, raped and lying in the middle of a park. She had been left
for dead.’
Even today, the Libyan people are afraid to speak openly about Gaddafi’s depravity, fearing reprisals from his former henchmen.
But one woman – who was repeatedly raped by the despot over seven
years from the age of 15 – has anonymously spoken of how he terrorised
and abused her. She had been chosen to present the colonel with a
bouquet when he toured her school in his home town of Sirte on the
Mediterranean coast, 350 miles east of Tripoli.
When he patted her head afterwards, in an apparently paternal
gesture, she thought she had pleased the man she and her fellow Libyans
were forced to call ‘the Guide’.
The next day three woman dressed in military uniform arrived telling
her parents she was needed to present more flowers. Instead, she was
driven at high speed to Gaddafi’s lair. Once there, he barked at his
women soldiers: ‘Get her ready.’
The girl was stripped, given a blood test and shaved of all but her
pubic hair. She was dressed in a G-string, forced into a low-cut gown
and had thick make-up plastered on her face. When she was shoved into
Gaddafi’s room, to her horror he was lying naked on the bed. When she
tried to run out, the women soldiers grabbed her and flung her back on
the bed.
She was raped repeatedly during the seven years she was held captive,
eventually escaping when a door was accidentally left unlocked.
Fuelled by cocaine and alcohol – and often Viagra – Gaddafi abused her horribly.
‘I
will never forget that first time, that moment,’ she says. ‘He
violated my body and pierced my soul with a dagger. That blade will
never come out.’
It took the documentary-makers months of negotiations to be allowed
access to information on Gaddafi as Libya remains secretive and
hide-bound by bureaucracy.
But they also established that Gaddafi set up a ‘murder for hire’
team run from Havana to rid him of enemies around the world. In a secret
interview from Cuba, former CIA agent Frank Terpil said: ‘I would say
[it was] Murder Incorporated . . . murder for hire. Gaddafi thought
that anybody who was a dissident, they [should be] eliminated, he had
contracts out on a bunch of people in London.’
He often stored the bodies of those killed in Libya in freezers so that he could regularly view them.
If Gaddafi was power-crazed, he was also paranoid. A Brazilian
plastic surgeon found himself escorted deep inside a bunker in Tripoli
in the middle of the night in order to remove fat from Gaddafi’s belly
and inject it into his increasingly wrinkled face.
Despite the pain, Gaddafi refused a general anaesthetic, fearing he might be poisoned – and because he wished to remain alert.
Halfway through the operation, he stopped to have a hamburger.
He also created an elite squad of bodyguards – all female – whom he
used for sex and forced to watch multiple barbaric executions.
For decades Gaddafi surrounded himself with these beautiful young
women. Dressed in close-fitting military uniforms, with manicured nails
and perfectly coiffed hair, they exuded glamour while toting guns.
But they were little more than disposable prostitutes used and abused by Gaddafi and his family.
Known as ‘the Haris al-Has’ – the private female guards – almost all
were coerced into joining his cadre. One of them, who admits she had
‘once adored him’, recalled the horrific treatment they had to endure.
‘Early one morning, at 2am, we were taken to a closed hall,’ she said.
‘We were to witness the murder of 17 students. We were not allowed to
scream. We were made to cheer and shout. To act as though delighted by
this display. Inside I was crying. They shot them all, one by one.’
According to Benghazi-based psychologist Seham Sergewa, who
interviewed scores of the girls for the International Criminal Court,
there were about 400 members of the elite squad over the years.
‘A pattern emerged in their stories,’ she explains. ‘The women would
first be raped by the dictator then passed on, like used objects, to one
of his sons and eventually to high- ranking officials for more abuse.
‘In one case a girl of 18 said she was raped in front of her father.
She kept begging her distraught father to look away. Many of the victims
say they contemplated suicide many times. Doubtless there were some who
took their own lives.’
It has also emerged that teams of boys were sent to Gaddafi’s sex
den, where they too were abused. Former chief of protocol Nuri Al
Mismari, who was at Gaddafi’s side for 40 years, adds: ‘He was terribly
sexually deviant. Young boys and so on. He had his own boys. They used
to be called the “services group”.
All of them were boys and bodyguards . . . a harem for his
pleasure.’ One of the few Libyans who was prepared to be named and talk
about the horrors Gaddafi inflicted on his people was Baha Kikhia, the
widow of Libya’s former foreign minister with whom Gaddafi had a frosty
relationship.
When her husband vanished one evening, she confronted Gaddafi about
his whereabouts. The colonel insisted he was being kept alive but, to
Baha’s horror, his body was one of many found in freezers after the
regime fell.
‘He liked to keep his victims in the refrigerators to look at
them now and again,’ she says haltingly. ‘He would visit his victims.
‘It was as though they were some sort of macabre souvenirs.
Something that he could look at and touch to remind himself of his
omnipotence. Some had been there as long as 25 years.’
Posts
ade was to move into his house and he started sleeping
with me whenever he likes as if we are already married. The thing is
getting too much, even when am having my "monthly visitor" he will tell
me to go and watch my body that he needs séx and I don't have a choice
but to do it.
