RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Colonel Gaddafi hanged his first political opponent in Benghazi’s basketball stadium, thousands of schoolchildren and students were rounded up to watch a carefully choreographed, sadistic display of the regime’s version of justice.

They had been told they would see the trial of one of the Colonel’s enemies.

But instead a gallows was dramatically produced as the condemned man knelt in the middle of the basketball court, weeping and asking for his mother, hands bound behind his back.

The crowd, many of them children, cried and yelled out “No, no” or called on God to help them as they realised what was about to happen. Two young men bravely ran up to the revolutionary judges and begged them for mercy.

The worst moment came right at the end, as the hanged man kicked and writhed on the gallows. A determined-looking young woman stepped forward, grabbed him by the legs, and pulled hard on his body until the struggling stopped.

“Afterwards everyone knew why she did it,” said Ibrahim Al-Shuwehdy, 47. “She was ambitious, and Colonel Gaddafi has always promoted ruthless people.”

She knew Gaddafi would be watching on live television and would see her.

“Sure enough, afterwards she was rapidly promoted. That terrible thing she did was the making of Huda Ben Amir’s career.”

It was Mr Al-Shuwehdy’s cousin, a young aeronautical engineer called Al-Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy, who was hanged that day in 1984, aged 30. He had returned from university in America three months earlier and had started to quietly campaign against Gaddafi’s brutal rule.

The woman who shocked Libya by humiliating Al-Sadek in his dying moments was at that time a lowly young Gaddafi loyalist. Twenty-seven years later, Huda Ben Amir is one of the richest and most powerful women in Libya and one of the most hated, a favourite of the colonel, a member of his privileged elite, and twice mayor of Benghazi.

She fled from the city as soon as the uprising broke out two weeks ago, leaving her mansion home to be burned down, but she has not yet left the colonel’s side. On Wednesday she was spotted on television standing next to him at one of his rambling speeches in Tripoli, a fat woman in late middle age, squeezed into camouflage fatigues, fist pounding the air in time with his chanting supporters.

For years in Benghazi she was loathed as a party boss, but nothing she did afterwards spread fear of her like her behaviour at Al-Sadek’s execution. It earned her the nickname Huda Al-Shannaga – Huda the executioner.

She boasted about it afterwards. “We don’t need talking, we need hangings,” was one of the sayings that the people of Benghazi remember her by.

The young man she humiliated in death couldn’t have been more different.

“He was quiet and gentle. He liked everybody and everybody liked him,” said Mr Al-Shuwehdy, a businessman who still lives in the city.

“When Al-Sadek came back from America he got a job working as an engineer at the airport, but he didn’t like what he saw in Libya. He wanted freedom, so he joined a group of friends that was peacefully campaigning against Gaddafi’s rule. He said that everybody should wake up and not follow this dictator’s regime.”

His fate was perhaps inevitable, at a time when Gaddafi’s rule was at its most brutal. At 3am Al-Sadek was seized at his home by the secret police and disappeared into the night.

A few months later he was hanged in public. It was the first such execution – previously the regime had shot its enemies in secret – but there were to be many more hangings in the basketball stadium, which is still in use in the centre of the town.

Afterwards, Mr Al-Shuwehdy’s family never received a body – they have no grave to visit – and when mourners gathered outside their house, thugs arrived and shot into the air to intimidate them until they left. For years afterwards anyone related to Al-Sadek struggled to find a decent job or a place at university.

Huda Ben Amir, on the other hand, prospered. She married and had two children – “What does she tell them about Al-Sadek, I wonder?” asked Mr Al-Shuwehdy – and became a leading member of Gaddafi’s Legan Thwria, the organisation of revolutionary committees he set up to reward his followers.

To succeed, its members had no need for talent or capacity for hard work – only loyalty was required.

Before Al-Sadek’s hanging, Mrs Ben Amir was a nobody, living in a miserable two-room bungalow in central Benghazi. Afterwards her family enjoyed living in a huge home in the most upmarket part of Benghazi, with a view of the Mediterranean from the top floor. She had big houses, nice cars, and a lifestyle of parties and foreign travel.

Her enemies believe she creamed off millions of pounds during her two stints as mayor of the city.

She was still mayor when the uprising broke out. The people of the city hated her so much that they set fire to it on three separate occasions in the past two weeks. They also scrawled obscene graffiti about her on walls across the city.

The son of her next door neighbour died in the protests, shot as he returned from the funeral of a murdered demonstrator. Ibrahim Hassan Alijoroushi, the 23-year-old brother of the dead man, said: “She never spoke to any of her neighbours. Actually we wouldn’t have spoken to her. She was a devil in the form of a woman.”

Mrs Ben Amir was born in the small town of Al Marg, east of Benghazi, then attended the University of Garyounis in Benghazi, one of Libya’s finest universities.

When she became mayor, she was famous for always having a pistol on her side. She did not disguise her contempt for Benghazi, the city which Gaddafi hated.

“There are no real men in Benghazi – Hura Ben Amir is the only real man in Benghazi,” she said during one speech.

One resident of the city said he had complained to her last year about unemployment and high prices. “What can I do – everything is decided from the top,” she told him with a shrug.

Mr Al-Shuwehdy only ever saw her once, last year in Tripoli where he was working as a florist, decorating the airport for the September anniversary of Gaddafi’s revolution.

“She was bossing people around, clearly enjoying her power. I felt fear when I saw her. I wanted to ask her why she had done that to Al-Sadek, if she ever felt sorry about it.

“But of course in Gaddafi’s Libya you could not ask such questions so I was silent. Inside I was burning.”

Years after the dreadful death of his cousin, Mr Al-Shuwehdy feels it has at last served a purpose.

Last month he was one of the first demonstrators in the city, together with other relatives of men executed by Gaddafi. Their protests began the uprising which overthrew Gaddafi’s rule in the east of the country.

Mr Al-Shuwehdy is raising money to help the militias which have sprung up to defend Benghazi and, together with friends, is supplying spare parts for their vehicles.

“We never forgot Al-Sadek and his example has inspired us all,” he said. “I just wish he was alive to see this day of freedom. We are committed now. We must either be free or Gaddafi will come back and kill us all.”

There is no going back for Huda Ben Amir either. Her enemies believe that Gaddafi may be holding her children hostage – which they claim is a common way for the regime to control its lieutenants.

Mr Al-Shuwehdy hopes she will one day go on trial for her crimes, but believes her day of reckoning may come before that.

“Her place is in Tripoli now next to the colonel. His supporters have a chance to show that they can die bravely with him. Huda Ben Amir lived her life as a loyalist to him. She may have no choice now but to die a loyalist for him too.”