Eman al-Obedidy talks to CNN about her rape by Gadhafi’s forces
A Libyan woman who says she is the person who burst into a Tripoli hotel to tell foreign journalists that she had been gang raped by Moammar Gadhafi’s troops told a CNN interviewer Monday that she is out of custody but is receiving death threats from regime loyalists.
CNN said it was confident that the woman interviewed is in fact Iman al-Obeidi, who made international headlines on March 26 when she was dragged away from the Rixos Hotel by government agents as she screamed her allegations of rape to foreign reporters.
The CNN interviewer, Anderson Cooper, said the network could not be certain the woman they spoke to by telephone is al-Obeidi, but they were satisfied it was her after days of research and from the testimony of several people who had talked with al-Obeidi at the hotel and with the women interviewed. She spoke in Arabic through a female translator, but was not shown on camera.
The story she told was also consistent with the account al-Obeidi gave at the hotel.
She said, “There is no safe place for me in Tripoli. All my phones are monitored, even this phone I am speaking on right now is monitored. And I am monitored.”
“Yesterday I was kidnapped by a car and they beat me in the street, then brought me here after I was dragged around,” she said.
“Yes, yes, I want to leave Tripoli. In the middle of the night I get nightmares, and I feel threats 24 hours a day. They are constantly threatening me, with death.”
The woman interviewed by CNN said that after the initial hotel uproar, Gadhafi’s militamen bought her new clean clothes and took her to the Libyan TV station to have her broadcast a recantation of her story, to say that the rebels had raped her, but she refused to do so.
“The TV station has no credibility and I was fearing the consequences,” she told CNN. “Behind the camera, I was facing 15 Kalashnikovs.”