How Gaddafi Raped Young Girls As Young As 14
IT has been more than two years since the capture and death of Muammar
Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator whose reign subjected an impoverished people to
four decades of murder and terror.
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.
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.
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,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.’ 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,’ ‘He violated my body
and pierced my soul with a dagger. That blade will never come out.’
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.’
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.’
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,
‘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.
The bedraggled former leader was hauled out of a drainpipe and shot in October
2011, his death ended the bloody Nato-led civil war that had ravaged the
country since the start of that year.
Storyville: Mad Dog – Gaddafi’s Secret World will be shown on BBC4 at 10pm today February 3.
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