Following are excerpts
from a report about Aziza Ibrahim, a former bodyguard of Libyan leader
Al-Qadhafi, which aired on Al-Jadid/New TV on February 27, 2011:
Reporter: What
does the Lebanese village of Ainata have to do with Tripoli, Libya?
That is a good question. In this little village lives a woman called
Aziza, who used to have Mu'ammar Al-Qadafhi's back.
Aziza Ibrahim has nothing
left but memories. Today, 17 years after her return from Libya, the
"revolutionary nun," as Al-Qadhafi called his female bodyguards,
decided to acknowledge that she was one of them. She has no photograph
or evidence to support what she says, but we believe her, because she
knows more than expected.
Aziza Ibrahim:
First, Al-Qadhafi's female bodyguards must refrain from getting married.
He calls them "revolutionary nuns," and nuns cannot get married.
Secondly, she needs to have a strong personality, because she has to
get along without her family.
She may have to kill
members of his family. There was a female bodyguard, for example, called
Jamila Abu Ghneim, who used to terrify us. She killed his cousin, Colonel
Hassan Shkeir Al-Qadhafi. He raised his voice at Mu'ammar during an
argument, in front o fall of us, and just because of this, she shot
him, next to Al-Qadhafi.
Reporter: In 1982,
after the Israeli invasion of Beirut, Aziza went to Libya, in a program
for Nasserist students, and there, as fate – and the intelligence
agency – would have it, she met Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi. Oh his first
visit to China she accompanied him, as one of his female bodyguards,
whom he handpicks.
Aziza Ibrahim:
His real female bodyguards... Note that he has two black women – a
colonel and a captain. The other ten bodyguards are like me. It is in
order to show that all his bodyguards are women. They don't have to
be nasty. He wants to show that he is guarded by women, and not men,
and this promotes the status of women, proving that women are equal
to men in all rights and duties.
Al-Qadhafi wrote in his
Green Book: "Women are female, and men are male. Women give birth,
and men do not. That is the only difference". That's written in
the Green Book.
Reporter: One
day, the People's Committees accompanied Aziza, with some other bodyguards
of Al-Qadhafi and other female students, to the university complex,
where Al-Qadhafi was to deliver a speech. What happened there is unimaginable.
Aziza Ibrahim:
They brought students in order to hang them. There was a law student,
accused of calling someone he knew in Iraq. One was from the Faculty
of Economics. They hanged four students that day. The first one they
hanged did not die immediately. They tugged at his legs until he died.
While they were tugging at his legs, I was sitting on the steps. I couldn't
bear it.
At 2 AM, they entered
where we lived, and said: You are coming to the sports complex. They
took us, just as were, to a closed hall in the sports complex. They
executed 17 students – by shooting, not by hanging. 17 students –
in front of our eyes. In a closed hall, the sounds are different. You
are not allowed to scream. You have to shout in support, because these
are traitors. One of them wasn't a traitor. His cousin was a pilot who
defected. They couldn't get his cousin, so they took him instead.
Reporter: Aziza
is overcome by emotion when she watches the man in green whom she once
protected with her life, approaching the autumn of his rule. She does
not merely wish him dead, but she says that if she were still his bodyguard
today, she would kill him herself.
[...]