Even the most hardened critic of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi must have felt a little sorry this week for his daughter Aisha.
After fleeing Libya for Algeria, her new hosts announced the 35-year-old had just given birth to a baby girl, barely a day after crossing the border. All very traumatic. Not least because the birth came barely four months after Aisha claimed a NATO airstrike had killed her other baby girl, four-month-old Mastoura.
Hang on. Two babies in eight months? It’s possible — just about. However, it also might not be the first time the Qaddafi regime has used babies as propaganda. In June, Qaddafi aides took reporters to see a seven-month-old girl who had apparently been injured by NATO strikes. Or so they thought — until a hospital staff member slipped a reporter a note, written in English: “This is a case of road traffic accident. This is the truth.”
It’s an old trick, too. In 1986, Libyan media reported Qaddafi’s adopted (and previously unheard of) daughter Hana had been killed in an US bombing raid. It was plausible — until, 13 years later, a 13-year-old Hana Qaddafi was photographed meeting then-South African president Nelson Mandela, very much alive. Then, earlier this year, journalists found financial statements for a Hana Gaddafi — born Nov. 11, 1985, making her six months old at the time of the 1986 airstrikes — and were told by Libyan officials that she was alive and well, and working as a state doctor.
Finally, last week, reporters scouring Qaddafi’s compound found medical qualifications and a British Council certificate for the same Hana Qaddafi — further proof, it seemed, for Hana’s existence.
Case closed? Perhaps not: The British Council then suggested that this was a second Hana, “adopted after the other Hana’s death and given the same name as a tribute.”
As the Guardian’s Peter Walker has asked (“Gaddafi’s daughter Hana: dead or a practising doctor?” Aug. 26), is Hana Qaddafi “a person who never existed, a dead infant, a 25-year-old doctor or a combination of the latter two?”
China has possibly committed “genocide” in its treatment of Uighurs and other minority Muslims in its western region of Xinjiang, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China said in a report on Thursday. The bipartisan commission said that new evidence had last year emerged that “crimes against humanity — and possibly genocide — are occurring” in Xinjiang. It also accused China of harassing Uighurs in the US. China has been widely condemned for setting up complexes in Xinjiang that it describes as “vocational training centers” to stamp out extremism and give people new skills, which others have called concentration camps. The UN says that
A racing pigeon has survived an extraordinary 13,000km Pacific Ocean crossing from the US to find a new home in Australia. Now authorities consider the bird a quarantine risk and plan to kill it. Kevin Celli-Bird yesterday said he discovered that the exhausted bird that arrived in his Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 last year had disappeared from a race in the US state of Oregon on Oct. 29. Experts suspect the pigeon that Celli-Bird has named Joe — after US president-elect Joe Biden — hitched a ride on a cargo ship to cross the Pacific. Joe’s feat has attracted the attention
Australian scientists have raised questions over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca and University of Oxford COVID-19 vaccine in establishing herd immunity, calling for a pause on its widespread rollout as the country recorded one new case of the virus yesterday. Opposition to the vaccine casts a cloud over Australia’s immunization plans, with 53 million doses of the AstraZeneca jab already on hand. “The question is really whether it is able to provide herd immunity. We are playing a long game here. We don’t know how long that will take,” Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology president Stephen Turner said. Turner added
The Polish Supreme Court on Friday quashed a lower court’s green light for the extradition of a businessman to China for alleged fraud, a charge he has denied, saying that he is being targeted for supporting Falun Gong. Polish authorities took Chinese-born Swedish citizen Li Zhihui, now 53, into custody in 2019 on an international warrant issued by China for alleged non-payment in a business deal, Krzysztof Kitajgrodzki, his Polish lawyer, told reporters. Following the Supreme Court ruling, the case would return to a lower appellate court for review. Kitajgrodzki told reporters that it was still not a given that his client
RSS