Benghazi, March 02: AN overweight, balding, office worker, Mahdi Zeeyou, makes for an unlikely revolutionary hero. Yet he is hailed as the man whose death marked a turning point in the crucial battle for Benghazi.
Mr Zeeyou, 49, who worked for the Arabian Gulf Oil Company for 30 years, joined the anti-Gaddafi protests on the first day and became enraged by the violence the government was using against its own people.
Late at night, after three days of bloody chaos, one of his neighbours, Hamed Salah, 20, saw Mr Zeeyou loading propane gas canisters into his car and offered to help.
His neighbour told him to go to bed. The next day, when a funeral procession for those killed the previous day came close to the city’s dreaded military base, the Katiba, a car broke free and sped towards the double gates of the compound. Mr Zeeyou was at the wheel.
He sped past the first barricades and detonated his gas tanks and home-made bombs at the second, blowing a hole in the defences and turning the tide of the battle.
“He was very sociable and funny, everyone in the company knew him,” said Mohammed Abdelhafif, his friend and colleague of 25 years. “I was very surprised. He did this courageous act out of patriotism and because he had seen the massacres against the people of Benghazi.”
Earlier, Mr Salah’s 21-year-old brother had been caught by the security forces, beaten and used as a human shield against the home-made bombs the protesters were hurling at the base. He was freed after the base fell. “I would be dead without Mahdi,” he said.
Two weeks ago, Fathi Terbil, 39, was in one of Colonel Gaddafi’s prisons. Now he is a leading member of the revolutionary council in Benghazi. It was the arrest of this human rights lawyer that triggered the protests. “I never thought that a regime that lasted for 42 years could fall in just a few days,” he said. “We are on our way to complete the eradication of the regime.”
In the sky above the desert, another dramatic incident was played out. The two-man crew of a Libyan fighter-bomber had been ordered to blow up water reservoirs and oil installations near Benghazi, but the pilot decided that he could not bomb his own people. The bombardier, a Gaddafi loyalist, held a pistol to the pilot’s head after he refused to hold course. The pilot ejected, forcing the other man to follow, and the plane crashed in the desert. The bombardier is now in jail.
–Agencies