What connects the town of Ainata to Tripoli of the West?
In this small town, a woman called Aziza was once one of Gaddafi's bodyguards.
Aziza Ibrahim comes to us bearing only her memories. 17 years following her return from Libya
the "revolutionary nun" as Gaddafi calls his bodyguards
decided to speak out about being one of these women.
She has no photos or evidence, but we have to believe her, because she knows more than she should.
"If you want to be a bodyguard, you don't marry, because he calls them nuns and nuns don't marry."
"Secondly, she has to have a strong personality, have no need for her family."
"She might have to kill her family."
"One guard for example, Jamile Gurnan, she used to terrify us,
she killed his cousin Hassan Shkal, Shkal are also Qaddadfa (of his tribe)."
"He raised his voice against Muammar in a discussion
in front of us all, as soon as he raised his voice, she shot him, in front of Muammar."
In 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Beirut, Aziza travelled to Libya with a Nasserite student group
As events turned out, she met Muammar, and accompanied him in his first visit to China
as one of his chosen guards.
"The real guards who are with him, if you notice, some are black and have a certain rank, and the other ten or so
were there to give the appearance that all his guards are women. That women guard him not men
This is intended to lift women's standing, to show he believes women are equal to men
Equal in all duties and rights. As he said in his Green Book, "the woman is female and the man is male."
[Laughs.] That's the only difference between them.
"And the woman bears children and the man doesn't."
This is in the Green Book, the social section.
One day, the Popular Commitee took Aziza and other bodyguards and students
to a university campus where Gaddafi was giving a speech.
What happened there couldn't be imagined.
"They brought in the students they wanted to hang."
"One was from law school, his accusation was that he called someone he knew in Iraq."
"Another was an economics student. They were four hanged altogether."
"The first person, he didn't die. They pulled on his legs till he died, and I was sat there frozen."
"At 2 am they came to us and said you need to go to the sport stadium. They took us to the winter arena."
"He executed 17 people, students, shooting not hanging."
"17, in front of us, in this gym so the sound was amplified."
"You weren't allowed to scream. You had to chant."
"These are traitors. One of them, he wasn't even the traitor, his cousin was a defected pilot."
"They couldn't arrest his cousin so they took him instead."
Aziza watches the man she used to guard face the end of his rule and wishes he would die
She says if she was still his bodyguard, she would have killed him herself.