The Telegraph UK
written by By Andrew Gilligan, Tripoli
Monday August 29, 2011
"Come with me," said the man, "and I will show you where Gaddafi buried people alive."
We'd been looking around the newly-liberated prison, which for all its fearsome reputation struck me as fairly all right. The large communal cells had carpets, fans, kitchens, showers and even power points. The prison, scene of a notorious massacre in 1996, was later turned into a showplace for visiting foreigners.
But that was not where Gaddafi's police state did its real business. They took the political prisoners somewhere else, somewhere much harder to find.
A few blocks away, on Traffic Light Street, there was a gate in a high-walled compound. Even when it was open, all you could see was blue corrugated-iron garages, a vehicle transport store. But out of sight of the road, behind the garages and another wall, was a concrete building: Gaddafi's torture chamber.
There was a small hallway, with cupboard doors on both walls. It all seemed quite ordinary and I started to get impatient: had I misunderstood my companion, was I on a wild-goose chase? But then I opened one of the cupboard doors, and I saw.
There was a corridor, and off it there were cells, rows of minute black cells. Each was no more than the length of a man, no bigger than your front door laid flat on the ground, with just enough space for a single mattress.
There was no light in these cells; none, apart from one small hole in the ceiling, the size of a drainpipe, casting a dim shaft from somewhere up above.
Later, I climbed up a ladder to the roof, and found that each of these portholes had a cover, movable so the inmate could be left completely in the dark.
Casting about with torches, we found that the entombed had left traces, messages scratched in the walls: "I pray to God that I can spend Eid with my family," wrote Hakim. Eid is tomorrow. Whoever he is, Hakim's prayers may have been answered; or, as the evidence of massacres grows, he may, in the final hours before the regime's own death, have been hauled out and killed.
There were no bodies here, but there was evidence of great suffering. Some of the mattresses, and some of the walls, were stained with blood.
Outside one cell was a metal stand with leather belts attached to it. The wall next to the stand appeared to have been clawed; there were fingernail marks and scratches in the smooth concrete.
"This is where they tied you up and then they beat you," said Adel Amr al-Mslati, a former prisoner held at the complex for three months.
He felt beneath the desk in the main hallway, and produced the wooden stave the interrogators used. It had a knob, like a solid clenched fist, on the end.
The wood was calloused and cracked from the thousands of blows it had delivered and it, too, was stained – at one end with the inmates' blood; at the other with the sweat of their torturers. I didn't need to ask Mr al-Mslati how he'd known where the stave was kept.
"I was arrested in Green Square on Feb 20," he said. "I was in here until May 14 before I was transferred to Abu Salim. This is where they kept you to evaluate you.
"You couldn't move, you could barely turn over in those cells, and you could hear the screaming and the moaning the whole time."
Not every part of the complex was like this. Right next door to the torture chamber, in bizarre contrast, was Gaddafi's VIP detention facility: seven small detached villas, with tasteful terracotta-tiled roofs, for foreigners, political rivals and other people the dictator wanted to treat with respect.
Each house had its own sitting room, office, bedroom and bathroom, complete with vanity unit. A storehouse contained hundreds of cans of (banned) Celtia beer. The furniture was fairly simple, but in somewhat higher taste than in Gaddafi's own compound. However, there was still a wall around the compound and watch towers on the wall.
Under Gaddafi, it seems, the whole country was a jail, and there was a prison for every occasion.
