As a Libyan woman makes a desperate, dramatic plea for help in a Tripoli hotel, Channel 4 News Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Miller witnesses how Gaddafi's forces deal with dissent

Lady's Cry for help, delt with brutaly by Qathafi's troups


Saturday 26 March 2011

Jonathan MillerForeign Affairs Correspondent

As a Libyan woman makes a desperate, dramatic plea for help in a Tripoli hotel, Channel 4 News Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Miller witnesses how Gaddafi's forces deal with dissent.Ordinarily, you might hope, that when a distressed young woman bursts into a public place claiming to have been repeatedly gang-raped at gunpoint, that she would be gently comforted, calmed down and her horrifying account of what had happened taken seriously.

But this is Gaddafi's Libya, and today I witnessed the shocking brutality of his regime and how it deals with those who dare dissent.

Eman al-Obeidi, who I’d judge to be in her mid-30s, burst into the dining room of the Tripoli hotel in which foreign journalists have been held under virtual house-arrest for the past two weeks.

She made her dramatic entrance as everyone was having breakfast. She started screaming: "Look what Gaddafi's militiamen have done to me" – and everyone in the room just froze.

We saw a government minder draw a gun from inside his jacket as waiting staff, suddenly showing their true colours, tried to silence her and get her out.  But by then a handful of reporters, me among them, had rushed over and as she sat, with tears running down her face, we tried to find out what on earth had happened. 

She told us she was from Benghazi and that she had been stopped at a checkpoint on Salahiddeen Road in Tripoli two days ago and “kidnapped” by the militia – the leader of which she named as Mansour Ibrahim Ali.

The road is the main route from Tripoli to Tajoura, where anti-Gaddafi protests briefly erupted a month ago, only to be suppressed.  Gaddafi’s son, Khamis, who leads a notorious tank brigade, has a sprawling barracks on that road.

'Raped and beaten'

She told us she'd been raped 15 times and that the militia men had bound her wrists to her ankles and defecated and urinated on her. She showed us a still-bloody laceration on her thigh and many marks and scratches, on her wrists and face.

It was hard to get her story down though because a hotel waitress, brandishing a knife, was screaming back at her that she was betraying the Brother Leader. That she was a traitor.


More -http://www.channel4.com/news/libya-a-womans-cry-for-help-in-tripoli-hotel