Copyright Sky News
This just came in over the e-mail transom:
A shocking scene occurred in Tripoli on Saturday when a gun was pointed at Sky News after a woman tried to tell foreign journalists about being raped and tortured by Libyan officials.
[…]
She claimed she had been held for two days, and that she had been raped and tortured.
The woman showed marks on her body which she said she had received as a result of beatings by the people who were holding her, Gaddafi supporters.
She showed marks on her legs and on her wrists, which she suggested came from handcuffs.
In a state of great distress, she said she had suffered this beating because she was from Benghazi, the city where the uprising began in the east of the country.
The NYT’s David Kirkpatrick, who differs with Sky in that he says she had nearly an hour to talk before being taken away, has more on her, including a name:
A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli on Saturday morning in an attempt to tell journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s militia. After struggling for nearly an hour to resist removal by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming.
“They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy, barging in during breakfast at the hotel dining room. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.” She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to come from binding around her hands and feet.
She said she had been raped by 15 men. “I was tied up, and they defecated and urinated on me,” she said. “They violated my honor.”
She pleaded for friends she said were still in custody. “They are still there, they are still there,” she said. “As soon as I leave here, they are going to take me to jail.”
For the members of the foreign news media here at the invitation of the government of Colonel Qaddafi — and largely confined to the Rixos Hotel except for official outings — the episode was a reminder of the brutality of the Libyan government and the presence of its security forces even among the hotel staff. People in hotel uniforms, who just hours before had been serving coffee and clearing plates, grabbed table knives and rushed to physically restrain the woman and to hold back the journalists.
Anyone wanna bet the first thing Gaddafi’s people say about this woman is that she’s from Al Qaeda?
