HOT STORY: Uncovered: The macabre sex chamber of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi

T has been more than two years since the capture and death of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator whose reign subjected an impoverished people to four decades of murder and terror.
When the bedraggled former leader was hauled out of a drainpipe and shot in October 2011, his death ended the bloody Nato-led civil war that had ravaged the country since the start of that year.
The full horror of his brutality has been slow to emerge, with many Libyans still fearing retaliation by those who continue to be loyal to their late leader. But it can now be revealed that the most heartbreaking of Gaddafi’s victims include hundreds, possibly thousands of teenage girls who, throughout his 42-year reign, were beaten, raped and forced to become his sex slaves.

Chilling: This is the bedroom in Gaddafi's 'sex dungeon', decorated in 70s style with brown walls and a double bed, where he would take girls as young as 14 and sexually abuse them against their will

Degrading: This is the fully-fitted gynecological suite where young girls would be placed in one of the two beds and checked for STDs before they were sent in to the waiting dictator

'Sexual deviant': Colonel Gaddafi kept hundreds of girls as sex slaves during his years at the helm of Libya, but also kept a 'harem' of young boys

Coerced: Gaddafi had a private all-female guard, some of whom he allegedly also abused, having 'selected' them from schools and universities across the country (file picture)

Ultimate terror: When a girl had been 'selected', Gaddafi's guards would kidnap her from her family, take her to the dungeon, where she would be stripped, checked for STDs, shaved of all but her pubic hair, plastered in makeup and sent in to Gaddafi, a witness has said

But they also established that Gaddafi set up a ‘murder for hire’ team run from Havana to rid him of enemies around the world. In a secret interview from Cuba, former CIA agent Frank Terpil said: ‘I would say [it was] Murder Incorporated . . . murder for hire. Gaddafi thought that anybody who was a dissident, they [should be] eliminated, he had contracts out on a bunch of people in London.’
He often stored the bodies of those killed in Libya in freezers so that he could regularly view them.