Gaddafi and his sons 'raped female bodyguards'
Col Muammar Gaddafi raped members of his famous unit of "Amazonian" female bodyguards, it has been claimed.
11:21PM BST 29 Aug 2011
The tall, uniformed women, who often accompanied Col Gaddafi during public appearances, were one of the best-known and most eccentric hallmarks of the dictator's 40 year rule.
But some of them underwent rape and sexual abuse, first by the Libyan leader and then passed onto senior officials as sexual playthings, a prominent Libyan psychologist claimed.
Dr Seham Sergewa told the Times of Malta that five of the bodyguards claimed they were raped by Col Gaddafi.
Their claims emerged during Dr Sergewa's investigation of reports that soldiers loyal to the regime used rape as a weapon of war and received Viagra and condoms to encourage the assaults.
One former bodyguard told Dr Sergewa that she was blackmailed into joining the protection unit after regime officials falsely claimed that her brother had been caught trying to bring drugs into Libya from Malta.
"She was told 'you either become a bodyguard or your brother will spend the rest of his life in prison,'" Dr Sergewa told the newspaper.
After being subjected to an HIV test by an "East European nurse", she was taken to Col Gaddafi's Bab Aziziya compound, which was overrun by rebels last week as they stormed into Tripoli.
He was wearing his pyjamas and relaxing in his private rooms. "She refused his advances and he raped her," Dr Sergewa said.
The psychologist, who is collecting evidence with the intention of handing it over to the International Criminal Court, said she had documented at least 300 rapes in Libya since the civil war began.
But she estimates that as many as 6,000 women may have been raped in total.
Other Libyan doctors and psychologists have disputed her claims and questioned her research methods, however, saying her findings need to be independently reviewed.
In June, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said there was evidence that Col Gaddafi had instructed his troops to rape women who had voiced opposition to his regime.
.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8729685/Gaddafi-and-his-sons-raped-female-bodyguards.html
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