Gadhafi’s girl executioner admits shooting 11 rebel prisoners

First you see her large brown eyes and rosebud lips, framed by a pink headscarf. Then you notice that her bruised feet are secured by manacles to the foot of her bed. Nisreen Mansour al Forgani is a pretty 19-year-old. She was also a serial killer for Colonel Moammar Gadhafi, the British Daily Mail newspaper reported Monday.

On Sunday in a heavily guarded room at the Matiga military hospital in Tripoli, she admitted to the Mail that she had executed as many as 11 suspected rebel prisoners in the days leading up to the fall of the Libyan capital last week. Shot at point-blank range, in cold blood.

“I killed the first one, then they would bring another one up to the room,” Nisreen was quoted as saying. “He would see the body on the floor and look shocked. Then I would shoot him too. I did it from about a meter away.”

One of thousands of girls and young women recruited by Gadhafi’s all-female militias, Nisreen is now a prisoner of the rebels and in fear of her life, the Mail said, adding, “Yet despite her killings, it is impossible not to feel pity for her.”

Nisreen claims ­ and her doctors and even some of the rebel fighters believe her ­ that she had to shoot under great duress, according to the newspaper.

She also says that she was sexually abused by senior military figures, one of whom was the commander of the elite Tripoli brigade tasked with protecting Gadhafi himself.

“I told them (the rebels) what I did,” she said. “They are angry. I do not know what will happen to me now.”

So how did this slight young woman, who used to live with her mother in Tripoli and enjoy dance music, come to have so much blood on her hands?

Nisreen was quoted as saying that her family were not supporters of the Gadhafi regime, although that is hard to verify at this stage in post-liberation Tripoli. Her parents split up when she was a child, and Nisreen did not like her father’s new wife so she went to live with her mother.

One of her mother’s friends, a woman called Fatma al Dreby, was the leader of the female branch of Gaddafi’s Popular Guards militia -- and this, it seems, was the fateful factor, the newspaper said.