Libya, April 17: From her father’s compound, struck by US bombs exactly 25 years ago, Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter sent a defiant message early Friday, “Libya was not defeated by airstrikes then and won’t be defeated now,” she told a cheering crowd.
The daughter, Aisha, pumped her right fist as she led the audience in late-night chants from the second-floor balcony of the badly damaged Bab Aziziyah compound, targeted by US warplanes in 1986. “Leave our skies with your bombs,’’ she said, referring to NATO airstrikes that had struck Tripoli just hours earlier.
Libya’s secret service was held responsible for the April 5, 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco that killed two US servicemen. Ten days later, US warplanes struck targets in Benghazi and Tripoli, including Gaddafi’s Bab Aziziyah compound. Gaddafi never repaired Bab Aziziyah, instead turning it into a museum.“Let me go back to the past when I was a child, when I was nine years old, in this house,’’ Aisha Gaddafi said. “A rain of missiles and bombs. They tried to kill me. They killed dozens of children in Libya.’’ “Now, after 25 years, the same missiles, the same bombs, rain on our children’s heads,’’ she said. “We are a people that cannot be defeated,’’ she added.
–Agencies