MEHDI MOHAMMED Zeyo’s family remember him leaving their apartment building that day with two household gas canisters in the boot of his car. His wife Samira thought little of it at the time. For days the mild-mannered, bespectacled father of two, who worked at a state-owned oil company, had helped ferry injured teenagers from outside the katiba, a sprawling military compound surrounded by high green and white walls from where Muammar Gadafy’s security forces showered protesters with bullets.
“He had become very angry,” says Samira. “After seeing the youth dying on the streets, he said to me: ‘Why are we not all doing something?’”
On the morning of February 20th, Zeyo drove the short distance from his home to the katiba. As he approached its main entrance, he flashed a victory sign to nearby demonstrators and picked up speed, prompting a blaze of gunfire from within. This triggered an explosion that ripped a massive hole in the gate, allowing protesters and soldiers who had defected to pour inside for the denouement of what was to prove the defining battle in the fall of Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, to the opposition.
More than 100 were killed in three days of fighting. But in the end, the dregs of Gadafy’s forces fled, apparently executing comrades who refused to shoot, and the katiba was no more.
Today, a handwritten cardboard sign outside the Zeyo family’s apartment block directs visitors to the home of “shaheed [martyr] Zeyo”. “He didn’t tell me what he was going to do when he left that day,” says Samira. “I am still in shock but I am proud too because my husband gave himself for freedom. He helped bring down the katiba.”
Zeyo has become one of the heroes of Libya’s uprising. His face adorns posters in Benghazi and a video of the explosion that killed him has circulated by means of mobile phone. His teenage daughters frequently visit the courthouse, where the protests began and continue each day.
Across the city thousands of Libyans wander through the burnt-out and ransacked buildings within the once-dreaded katiba’s walls, which now have gaping holes gouged out by bulldozers.
“You cannot imagine how frightened people were of this place and all that happened inside it,” says Fatima Badr. “If you were taken to the katiba, you were never seen again.”
She tells the story of a neighbour who was shot dead while walking past the compound in the 1990s. “He was just reaching to take something from his pocket and they killed him on the street.”
Inside, past the charred remnants of several military vehicles, is the blackened shell of what once had been an imposing proscenium stand where Gadafy declared himself the “king of kings of Africa”. Graffiti here and in other parts of the eastern Libya mocks this claim, calling him the “dog of dogs of Africa”.
One of the most popular buildings in what has become something akin to a macabre tourist site is a guesthouse used by Gadafy during his visits to Benghazi. Red-painted slogans on the soot-stained walls refer jeeringly to a speech Gadafy made after the protests began, in which he threatened to hunt down those responsible “from street to street and house to house”. Families and groups of young men pick their way through broken glass and fallen rafters, taking pictures and filming with their mobile phones.
“It is amazing to see this place that was so feared and forbidden for so long,” says one man.
A nearby piece of graffiti reads: “Such a long dark night but finally the dawn has come.” Lurid stories about what horrors might lie underneath the katiba abound.
Many talk of mass graves or secret torture chambers. Others believe there are underground prisons containing people who are still alive. In a section of the katiba which a select few of its 5,000-personnel were allowed enter, there are two dungeons which were used to house those who had crossed the regime. Most were later transferred to Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison and were never heard from again.
“This is an evil place,” says one local woman with a shiver. “You can feel it in the air. So many terrible things were done here.”