Violated woman fingers Gaddafi militia as the perpetrators

News
TRIPOLI — A weeping Libyan woman made a desperate plea for help yesterday, slipping into a Tripoli hotel full of foreign journalists to show bruises and scars she said had been inflicted on her by Muammar Gaddafi’s militiamen.

“Look at what Gaddafi’s militias did to me,” Eman al-Obaidi screamed with tears in her eyes, pulling up her coat to show blood on her upper leg in the restaurant of the hotel.

 

After being intimidated by security men and hotel staff, who also beat journalists trying to interview her, she was eventually bundled into a car and driven away.

Her face heavily bruised, she said she had been arrested at a checkpoint in Tripoli because she was from the city of Benghazi, bastion of the insurgency against Gaddafi’s rule.

“They swore at me and they filmed me. I was alone. There was whiskey. I was tied up,” she said, weeping and stretching out her arms to show scars. “They peed on me. They violated my honour.”

Her story could not be independently verified. It was unclear whether she had escaped or had been released.

“Investigators phoned me and said she was drunk, that she could be suffering mentally,” Libya’s government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim told reporters, citing a preliminary report. — Reuters