Subscribe Today
Request a Clip
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.
[...]