Lybia

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From the Associated Press:

For the past week, journalists stationed in Libya's capital city, Tripoli, have pressed government officials for information on Iman al-Obeidi.

The 29-year-old Libyan woman made international headlines last weekend after she burst into a hotel housing the foreign press corps. Visibly bruised, she alleged that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by 15 members of strongman Muammar Gadhafi's armed forces. Libyan security then whisked her away from the battery of cameras and tape recorders.

After the widely publicized incident, Libyan officials kept mum about al-Obeidi's whereabouts, and the country's state-run media carried out an aggressive smear campaign painting her as a prostitute and madwoman. Her family, however, said that she was a post-graduate law student studying in Tripoli.

But al-Obeidi emerged from seclusion Monday to offer more public testimony about her alleged gang-rape and captivity.

"I showed to the journalists my hands and legs. I was bound and tied up. I was beaten and tortured," she told CNN's Anderson Cooper through a translator in an interview that aired in part on his Monday prime time show, according to a transcript the network provided to The Cutline. "For two days they violated my freedom ... I want to convey to the journalists that the brigades who are supposed to protect people, look what they did to me."

In addition to the Cooper interview, Obeidi recounted the story of her initial detention to NPR and a Libyan opposition satellite channel. Her ordeal began, she said, when soldiers stopped her taxi at a checkpoint in Tripoli.

Once she was detained, she said, the assaults began. "They had my hands tied behind me," she told Cooper, "and they had my legs tied, and they would hit my while I was tied, and bite me on my body, and they would pour alcohol in my eyes so that I would not be able to see, and they would sodomize me with their rifles, and they would not let us go to the bathroom. We were not allowed to eat or drink. This is because I resisted them and tried to stop them from raping me."

During her second imprisonment--after she burst into the hotel lobby full of journalists--al-Obeidi said that she was pressured to recant the rape claims on Libyan state television. She refused, she said, "because the TV station does not tell the truth."

Details of al-Obeidi's release remain sketchy. Her present location is unconfirmed, but she reportedly made a second attempt to speak with journalists at the hotel this past weekend and was again rebuffed.

"There is no safe place for me in Tripoli," she told Cooper. "All my phones are monitored. Even this phone I am speaking on right now is monitored and I am monitored. And yesterday, I was kidnapped by a car and they beat me in the street and then brought me here after they dragged me around. They told me whenever you leave the house we will do this to you, meaning that I was not allowed to leave the house or see the journalists. I had asked to see the journalists. They beat and hit me and sent me back. Tell all the human rights organizations to return me safely to my family."

Also on Monday, a Libyan government spokesman told the Associated Press that al-Obeidi had made a deal with the country's attorney general that prohibited her from speaking with reporters.

"She broke her agreement with the attorney general by trying to speak to the media and was taken away," the spokesman told the newswire, which also spoke with a woman the government claimed was an attorney representing al-Obeidi in the rape case. "She doesn't want to speak to journalists because she said she wants to get justice through the courts," the woman told the AP. "But she is comfortable, living with her sister in Tripoli, and is in good spirits."

Al-Obeidi has come forward with her story at a critical juncture in the efforts of Gadhafi's regime to clamp down on the work of the foreign media. Journalists working out of Tripoli say they are contending with tightly monitored and almost surreal working conditions. Some even fear that their hotel-prepared food is being spiked with sedatives, according to NPR.

"That was why the outburst of Iman al-Obaidi ... was so revelatory," writes Liz Sly in The Washington Post. "In an instant, she crystallized the harsh realities of the Libya the government goes to such lengths to prevent journalists from seeing."

It's also possible that the widespread media exposure saved al-Obeidi's life.

The New York Times' David Kirkpatrick, who is on the ground in Tripoli, notes: "Thanks to the publicity in her first interviews ... she may have gotten off easy. Others in her situation, human rights advocates say, are typically confined for years in so-called rehabilitation facilities, subjected to unscientific virginity tests, deprived of any entertainment or education except lessons in Islam, and subjected to solitary confinement or handcuffs for any sign of resistance to authority."

As for al-Obeidi, she told Cooper she has constant nightmares of death and wishes to leave Tripoli, but is no longer afraid.

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Where in the world is Moammar Gadhafi?

"He's everywhere, he's nowhere; he's negotiating to get out, he will never surrender; who knows?" former United Nations official Mark Quarterman said of the contradictory reports about Gadhafi's fate in an interview Monday with The Envoy.
What's important for Libya's reconciliation process is not just that the dictator is on the way out, Quarterman stressed, but how he goes.
"Gadhafi's mode of leaving is very important," Quarterman, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Envoy. "If he leaves but aspects of his regime stick around—-people who keep the lights on, and pick up the garbage, and they cooperate with the new transitional authority, that's a good thing. ... But if there's chaos in his wake," that would be very bad.
Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, leader of the Libyan opposition National Transition Council, triumphantly declared "the Gadhafi era is over" Monday as rebels poured into the capital of Tripoli, meeting sporadic fighting and pockets of resistance in certain neighborhoods.
The NTC said they had three of Gadhafi's sons in custody or under house arrest--including former heir apparent Seif al-Islam Gadhafi and Gadhafi's eldest son, Mohammed. But they confessed they had no idea of the whereabouts of the dictator who has brutally ruled the North African nation for almost 42 years.
British and French leaders also claimed Monday to be in the dark about Gadhafi's coordinates, and South Africa denied that the Libyan ruler had found refuge there.
"Bab al-Aziziya and the surrounding areas are still out of our control," Abdel-Jalil told journalists at a triumphant press conference in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi Monday, the Associated Press reported, referring to the Tripoli neighborhood where the Gadhafi compound in located. "We have no knowledge of Gadhafi being there, or whether he is still in or outside Libya."Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, said Monday that "Paris did not know where [Gadhafi] was," Angus McSwan of Reuters reported. "British Prime Minister David Cameron said London had no confirmation of his whereabouts either."
American officials, for their part, told journalists they believe Gadhafi is most likely still in Libya, news agencies reported.
"I think that's probably fair to say that we believe he's still in the country," Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan told journalists Monday, ABC News reported. "On what basis can we say that? Just again, it's a belief. We do not have any information that he has left the country."
The Libyan strongman--with a penchant for wearing stand-out-in-a-crowd, brightly colored Bedouin-style robes as well as all-white 1970s-disco-era suits and heavy black eyeliner--made his last public appearance in mid-June, three months into the imposition of a NATO-led no-fly-zone.
Since then, as the tempo of NATO air strikes has increased, reportedly killing one of his sons and some of his grandchildren, Gadhafi, 69, has delivered his typically defiant speeches--including one on Saturday that called the Libyan rebels "rats"--by telephone to Libyan state television from undisclosed locations.
Despite his public vows he would never surrender, however, American officials boasted to NBC last week that Gadhafi emissaries were privately negotiating a possible exit strategy for Gadhafi and his family.

South Africa formally denied Monday that Gadhafi had found refuge there. "The South African government would like to refute and dispel the rumors that it has sent planes to Libya to fly individuals to some undisclosed locations or South Africa," South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said Monday, Reuters reported.
Britain has also backed off earlier winks and nudges that Venezuela might have sent a plane for Gadhafi, Reuters' MacSwan wrote.
Many Libya hands in Washington put their money on Gadhafi being in Libya, possibly at his desert operating base in Sirte, in southern Libya, where he originally comes from, or nearby the capital.
A former congressional Middle East staffer who met with Gadhafi in late 2009 in Libya during the brief five year rapprochement between the United States and Gadhafi's Libya said he had been flown from Tripoli to a shoe-box airport and was then driven in a fleet of SUVs to Gadhafi's Sirte compound, styled like a Bedouin camp.
"He walked in with white linen pants, loafers with no socks, and a big flowy print shirt, wearing make-up, eye liner … and I thought, 'Caribbean night in the Libyan desert,'" the staffer told The Envoy in March. "It was surreal."
"I walked away from the meeting thinking, if this guy had been born in any other country, he would be in a mental institution or heavily medicated," the former staffer continued. He added, however, that the semi-comical aspects of Gadhafi's personality cult were overshadowed by the spooky atmosphere of intense fear he had imposed in the country -- a reign of fear from which Libyans hope the past day's dramatic events mark a decisive break.