A new British documentary scheduled to air next week reveals just how far former Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi went in his sexual depravity.
Hundreds of young girls and women – and even a collection of boys – were kept as sex slaves for Gaddafi, who routinely selected them by force from universities and abused them in dungeons found at his palaces.
“Some were only 14,” recalled a teacher at a Tripoli school. “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.”
Typically, Gaddafi would select his victims from schools that he was visiting to give a lecture. At the end of his talk, he would pat his chosen girls on the head before leaving. By day’s end, those girls were kidnapped from their families, who were killed if they attempted to resist.
Gaddafi’s victims were imprisoned for years and repeatedly raped. Some were so badly brutalised that their bodies were dumped and left to die in parking lots and waste sites.
The BBC4 documentary also shows a gynecological suite with two beds that was found in one of his palaces, where girls would be examined for sexually transmitted diseases and given abortions.
“He was terribly sexually deviant,” said Gaddafi’s former chief of protocol Nuri Al Mismari, who spent four decades at his side. “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.”
Perhaps one of Gaddafi’s most well-known signatures was his pack of all-female bodyguards, who numbered more than 400 over the years and who he also subjected to sexual and psychological abuse.
“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,” explained psychologist Seham Sergewa, who interviewed scores of his female bodygaurds for the International Criminal Court.
“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,” Sergewa continued.
In the documentary, one of Gaddafi’s former guards describes having to witness the murder of 17 students.
“Early one morning, at 2am, we were taken to a closed hall,” she said. “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.”
The documentary, which will air on Feb. 3, features a range of candid interviews, like one with the widow of Libya’s former foreign minister, who Gaddafi had killed and stored in a freezer – one of many – along with bodies of his other victims so that he could “visit” them from time to time.
Another interview is with former CIA agent Frank Terpil, who spoke of Gaddafi’s “murder for hire” squad of assassins that he would send to kill his detractors all over the world.
The documentary was filmed in Cuba, the Pacific, Brazil, the USA, South Africa, Libya and Australia and took months of negotiations with Libyan officials to gain access to the information.
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