The horror started with the lightest of touches. As the 15-year-old schoolgirl held out the bouquet to the 62-year-old man, he took her free hand and kissed it gently.
The man was Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya who had seized power 35 years before. His people were forced to call him the Guide, but the rest of the world knew him simply as Colonel Gaddafi.
That morning in April 2004, Gaddafi was visiting a school in his home town of Sirte, on the Mediterranean coast 350 miles east of Tripoli.
The girl had been selected to present the Guide with gifts and flowers, and it was considered a privilege.
Before Gaddafi arrived, she was trembling with nerves, and she continued to tremble as he looked her coldly up and down. He squeezed her palm and then her shoulder, before gently patting her head.
At the time she was euphoric. To have been touched by the Guide! It was a real honour.
She had no idea that the pat on the head, seemingly so paternal, actually signified something far more sinister.
The car arrived the next afternoon. The girl was working at her mother’s hairdressing salon when in walked three women, one of whom was dressed in a military uniform.
The women told the girl’s mother that her daughter was needed to present another bouquet to ‘Papa Muammar’ because she had conducted herself so ‘beautifully’ the previous day.
Despite the mother’s protestations, the girl was driven away at high speed to an encampment in the desert.
There she was once more introduced to Gaddafi, who was sitting in a red chair holding a TV remote control. He looked her up and down and barked to one of the women: ‘Get her ready!’
Now terrified, the girl was taken away and undressed. Her measurements and a blood sample were taken, then her entire body was shaved except for her pubic hair.
She was made to wear a G-string and a low-cut dress, and make-up was plastered on her face. She was then shoved into Gaddafi’s room.
To her disgust and shock, he was lying naked on his bed. The girl immediately tried to run out, but one of the female helpers grabbed her and insisted that she did what was required.
The girl sat next to Gaddafi on his bed and he started to kiss her. She remained frozen with fear until eventually she could take no more and pushed him away.
A struggle ensued until a female helper appeared.
‘Look at this whore!’ Gaddafi snapped. ‘Educate her! And then bring her back to me!’
The following evening, Gaddafi beat the girl and then got what he wanted.
‘I will never forget that moment,’ the girl later recalled. ‘He violated my body, but he pierced my soul with a dagger. The blade never came out.’
Such a tale might seem like something from the imagination of a particularly lurid and sadistic pornographer but, horrifically, it is true.
Though we do not know the girl’s real name, in a powerful new book called Gaddafi’s Harem, written by the French journalist Annick Cojean, she is simply called Soraya.
Cojean met Soraya in Tripoli in October 2011 and was immediately struck by her great beauty: apparently, she resembles the actress Angelina Jolie.
When Soraya told her story, Cojean did not doubt it for a second, as she had heard many similar tales of Gaddafi’s crimes before — but only second-hand, never from the victims themselves.
Cojean spent months verifying Soraya’s story. As well as meeting people who had known her through those dark years, she met other women who’d suffered a similarly brutal experiences at the hands of the Guide.
There can be no doubt that what Soraya says is the very painful truth. For almost seven years, Soraya was raped, beaten, abused and even urinated on by a man who claimed to be the great emancipator of women in the Arab world.
Many of the episodes in the book are too distressing to relate here, but it is sufficient to say they would turn even the strongest of stomachs.
Yet Soraya’s story is typical. She was just one of thousands of young Libyan girls and women who were kidnapped from their schools, homes or places of work and forced to be Gaddafi’s sex slaves.
Nor did the Libyan leader restrict his attentions to women. He also took delight in sexually abusing young male guards in front of his ‘harem’.
Fuelled by cocaine, whisky, cigarettes and Viagra, Gaddafi used sex not only as a physical weapon, but as a political tool through which he could exert his power.
Rape subjugates women — and at the same time subjugates the men who are close to them, such as their husbands and fathers.
Gaddafi was all too aware of this. The wives and daughters of senior figures were blackmailed, bribed, cajoled and forced into having sex.
Gaddafi not only enjoyed the act of degrading these girls and women, but relished the power it gave him over other men.
Some women were even abducted during their wedding ceremonies, as the ultimate show of omnipotence.
As one of Gaddafi’s close collaborators admitted after the tyrant’s death, sex was ‘all he seriously thought about’ and ‘he governed, humiliated, subjugated and sanctioned through sex’.
In public, Gaddafi claimed to have women’s rights at his heart. In 1981, he said that he had decided ‘to wholly liberate the women of Libya in order to rescue them from a world of oppression and subjugation’.
As ‘evidence’ of this most hollow of promises, Gaddafi surrounded himself with female bodyguards.
The message was clear: if the great Guide trusted women with his safety, then Libyan men should follow his example and treat women as equals.
However, the guards were little more than window dressing. Many of them had been kidnapped and raped by Gaddafi, and most had little military experience.
On occasion, when she wasn’t being raped or forced to snort cocaine, drink whisky or watch pornography — the list of abuses is endless — Soraya sometimes acted as one of Gaddafi’s supposedly elite guards.
In 2007, she accompanied the Guide on a tour of African states and put on the most stern expression, showing the world just how enfranchised Libyan women had become.
However, in private, on that very tour, Soraya had to pretend that she was indisposed in order to avoid being raped by the man she was supposedly protecting.
Gaddafi soon found out about her lie — Soraya had been seen having a swim — and he viciously beat her and spat on her before raping her.
‘I came out with a swollen face and they locked me up in a room,’ says Soraya.
From the other side of the door she was taunted by a woman called Mabrouka Sherif, Gaddafi’s leading procurer of girls and young women.
‘You wanted to escape, did you?’ Mabrouka asked her. ‘No matter where you may go one day, Muammar will find you again. And he will kill you.’
What makes the story of Gaddafi’s harem even more shocking is the complicity of women such as Mabrouka in procuring members of their own sex to satisfy their master’s twisted desires.
Thanks to her ability to get Gaddafi what he wanted — a seemingly endless supply of young virgins — Mabrouka rose to a position of immense power in Libya, Daily Mail informs.
