Every day, he will examine corpses and body parts
David Pratt
Twelve years in the “Hotel” – Ahmed Albousifi’s story
I REMEMBER him as a gentle, quietly spoken man, a father close to his family, who was fond of writing and poetry.
He wrote something himself once, a short, factual account that he titled rather deceptively, The Hotel.
The story tells of one morning when Ahmed Albousifi woke up full of the joys of life.
It was January 1989 and Ahmed remembers the smell of fresh coffee and the cold winter air full of the fragrance of flowers from his garden.
He listened to jazz music in his car on the way to work at a Libyan airport handling company where he was as an IT manager, but not before taking a deliberate detour along Tripoli’s corniche so he could catch a glimpse of the wide open expanse of the sea.
In all, Ahmed told me, that morning reminded him of why people “insist on life in spite of all its sorrows and troubles”.
What Ahmed didn’t know then was that for a long time to come he would never set eyes on his family again.
He would also never know why, that morning, two armed secret policemen came to his office, insisting they only wanted to talk to him for 10 minutes.
Ten short minutes that would turn into 12 years of living hell inside The Hotel, otherwise known as Abu Salim prison, Libya’s most dreaded jail under the dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Abu Salim is to Libya what Abu Ghraib was to Iraq.
Secret files discovered at the headquarters of the Libyan security services after the Gaddafi regime was overthrown in 2011 revealed that it was to this brutal place that British and US intelligence agents of MI6 and the CIA respectively helped render terrorist suspects from overseas before they were subsequently tortured by Gaddafi’s regime.
But Ahmed Albousifi was no terrorist. He had no interest in politics, let alone any affiliation with any of the Islamist or other groups that opposed Gaddafi and troubled the West at that time. Nevertheless, he was to receive the worst punishment Abu Salim could mete out.
“Maybe I was turned in for money – Gaddafi’s informers and followers were paid 10 dinars for every name they brought,” he said.
“It was a way of life for some people,” Ahmed recalled as we sat in a cafe in Tripoli in the wake of the revolution in Libya back in 2011.
Whatever the reason, blindfolded and handcuffed, he was driven to Abu Salim, only to find that even the prison administrator was perplexed by his presence.
“I have only your name, no other information about your arrest,” he admitted.
But such things matter little once brought through the gates of this hellhole.
As with all new arrivals, there was the prospect of the “wake-up party” as jailers called the beating that prisoners were subjected to from the moment they were dragged out of initial interrogation until thrown into a cell. That cell, the first Ahmed was to inhabit for the whole of the next year, sat in almost total darkness.
“From sunrise until sunset it was impossible to see the fingers held up in front of your face,” he recalled, before describing the other horrors this place held. “It was right next to the torturing room, and I spent about four months, perhaps only sleeping an hour or two a day because of the screams that came from there.”
Inside his cell was a small vent that he says was no more than 12cm by 50cm through which he could see. On the other side of this they hung up and tortured a man for 14 days. “His arms were tied behind him and he was kept on his tip-toes the entire time to keep the pressure on his limbs, every three days they would pour cold water on him and beat him with electric cables,” Ahmed recalled.
“For six months afterwards the man couldn’t move his arms without excruciating pain, because of what they had done to him,” he added.
Ahmed Albousifi spent almost 12 years inside the hell that was Abu Salim. His time in the ‘Hotel’ has marked him irreparably.
Does he have nightmares, I asked him that day when we talked? Pausing, he took a deep breath before answering.
“Ten years after my release there is never a week passes without nightmares,” he confessed.
“In here, I’m still living inside Abu Salim,” he says, gently tapping the side of his head.
“I always will be.”
From sunrise until sunset it was impossible to see the fingers held up in front of your face