'If Ahmed is dead, I hope not this way': a Libyan father's prayer for his rebel son
Ahmed plunged himself into the uprising around Ras Lanuf. His father, Mohammed, fears he has been tortured and killed
Mohammed Ahmed Boulika feared the worst, and it was not that his son had been shot dead in the heat of Libya's revolution.
Dressed in a black robe, with a pistol on his hip, Boulika walked the streets of the frontline town of Ras Lanuf with a picture of his son, more passport than rebel fighter, hanging around his neck alongside a sign: "I'm asking about my missing son, Ahmed Mohammed.
"I see the bodies of the rebels. The things they've done to them is the way you wouldn't treat an animal. They cut their ears, their lips, they pull out their nails, their beards. I can see they do this before they kill them," he said. "I clean the corpses at the hospital. I see things like this, strange things. If Ahmed Mohammed is dead I hope it is not this way."
Boulika, 56, and his son abandoned their jobs as lorry drivers to join the flood of rebel volunteers who grabbed a gun and tore off to the front at the beginning of Libya's revolution, imagining that the sheer weight of the uprising would roll over Gaddafi's forces and into Tripoli.
For several days their advance seemed unstoppable but the Libyan dictator soon regained his footing and Boulika and his son were among those who discovered that they would be required to fire their Kalashnikovs in anger if the revolution was to be saved. He admits he was not up for that kind of fight.
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