THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: For Libyans who suffered under four decades of Colonel Gaddafi's rule, the chance to see inside his holiday home was not to be missed - and provided an unusual form of anger management.
Among the crowds of sightseers and gangs of looters who traipsed through the front door of Muammar Gaddafi's wrecked summer palace last week was one man who took a very personal satisfaction at the sight.
"You have to remember that that he routinely destroyed the homes of his political opponents, bulldozing them to make an example," said Suleiman Jabril, standing in a layer of ash and smashed glass on the floor of what had been a sumptuous entrance hall. "Now his own house has been destroyed."
Mr Jabril, a civil servant aged 42, spent five years as a political prisoner in the regime's worst prison, narrowly escaping death when 1200 prisoners were massacred in 1996. Over the years the houses of many of his friends have been destroyed by the regime.
Last week he was one of hundreds of the dictator's former subjects to go sightseeing at the palace on a green hilltop above the city of Al-Bayda, a town in the mountains of the east where the Gaddafi clan would go to escape Libya's brutal summer heat. Continue reading and comment >>> Nick Meo, Colonel Gaddafi's summer palace, Al-Bayda | Saturday, March 12, 2011
