Benghazi: When Colonel Muammar Gaddafi hanged his first political opponent in Benghazi's basketball stadium, thousands of schoolchildren and students were rounded up to watch a carefully choreographed, sadistic display of the regime's version of justice.
They had been told they would see the trial of one of the colonel's enemies. But instead the gallows were produced as the condemned man knelt in the middle of the basketball court, weeping and asking for his mother, hands bound behind his back.
The crowd cried and yelled out "No, no" or called on God to help them as they realised what was about to happen. Two young men bravely ran up to the revolutionary judges and begged them for mercy.
The worst moment came at the end, as the hanged man kicked and writhed on the gallows. A determined-looking young woman stepped forward, grabbed him by the legs, and pulled hard on his body until the struggling stopped.
"Afterwards everyone knew why she did it," said Ebrahim Al Shuwehdy, 47. "She was ambitious, and Colonel Gaddafi has always promoted ruthless people."
She knew Gaddafi would be watching on live television and would see her. "Sure enough, afterwards she was rapidly promoted. That terrible thing she did was the making of Huda Ben Amir's career."
It was Al Shuwehdy's cousin, a young aeronautical engineer called Al Sadek Hamed Al Shuwehdy, who was hanged that day in 1984, aged 30. He had returned from university in America three months earlier and had started to quietly campaign against Gaddafi's rule. The woman who shocked Libya by humiliating him in his dying moments was then a lowly young Gaddafi loyalist.
Inner circle member
Now, 27 years later, Huda Ben Amer is both one of the richest and most powerful women in Libya and one of the most hated. She is a favourite of the colonel, a member of his elite, and twice mayor of Benghazi.
She fled from the city as soon as the uprising broke out two weeks ago, leaving her mansion home to be burned down.
On Wednesday she was spotted on television standing next to him at one of his rambling speeches in Tripoli, squeezed into camouflage fatigues, fist pounding the air in time with his chanting supporters.
For years in Benghazi she was loathed, but nothing she did afterwards spread fear of her like her behaviour at Al Sadek's execution. It earned her the nickname Huda Al Shannaga — Huda the executioner.
"We don't need talking, we need hangings," was one of the sayings that the people of Benghazi remember her by. The young man she humiliated in death couldn't have been more different.
"He was quiet and gentle. He liked everybody and everybody liked him," Al Shuwehdy said.
"When Al Sadek came back from America he got a job working as an engineer at the airport, but he didn't like what he saw in Libya. He wanted freedom, so he joined a group of friends that was peacefully campaigning against Gaddafi's rule. He said that everybody should wake up and not follow this dictator's regime."
But at 3am one morning Al Sadek was seized at his home by the secret police and disappeared into the night. A few months later he was hanged in public. It was the first such execution — previously the regime had shot its enemies in secret — but there were to be many more hangings in the basketball stadium, which is still in use in the town centre.
Afterwards, Al Shuwehdy's family never received a body and when mourners gathered outside their house, thugs arrived and shot into the air until they left. For years afterwards anyone related to Al Sadek struggled to find a decent job.
Huda, on the other hand, prospered. She married and had two children and became a leading member of Gaddafi's Legan Thwria, the organisation of revolutionary committees he set up to reward his followers.
Huda was born in the small town of Al Marg, east of Benghazi, then attended the University of Garyounis in Benghazi, one of Libya's finest universities.
However, before Al Sadek's hanging, she was a nobody, living in a two-room bungalow in Benghazi. Afterwards her family enjoyed living in a huge home in the most upmarket part of Benghazi, complete with a view of the Mediterranean from the top floor.
Corruption
She had big houses, nice cars, and a lifestyle of parties and foreign travel. Her enemies believe she creamed off millions during her two stints as mayor of the city. She was still in charge when the uprising broke out, and the people of the city hate her so much that they have set fire to it on three separate occasions in the past two weeks.
They also scrawled graffiti about her on walls across the city. The son of her nearest neighbour died in the protests, shot as he returned from a demonstrator's funeral. Ebrahim Hassan Alijoroushi, the 23-year-old brother of the dead man, said: "She never spoke to any of her neighbours. Actually we wouldn't have spoken to her. She was a devil in the form of a woman."
When she became mayor, she was famous for always having a pistol on her side. She did not disguise her contempt for Benghazi, the city which Gaddafi hated.
"There are no real men in Benghazi — Huda Ben Amer is the only real man in Benghazi," she said once.
Al Shuwehdy only saw her once, last year in Tripoli where he was working as a florist, decorating the airport for the anniversary of Gaddafi's revolution.
"She was bossing people around, clearly enjoying her power. I felt fear when I saw her. I wanted to ask her why she had done that to Al Sadek, if she ever felt sorry about it. But of course in Gaddafi's Libya you could not ask such questions so I was silent. Inside I was burning."
Years after the death of his cousin, Al Shuwehdy feels it has at last served a purpose. Last month he was one of the first demonstrators in the city, together with other relatives of men executed by Gaddafi.
Revolution financiers
Their protests began the uprising which overthrew Gaddafi's rule in the east of the country.
Al Shuwehdy is raising money to help the militias which have sprung up to defend Benghazi and, together with friends, is supplying spare parts for their vehicles.
"We never forgot Al Sadek and his example has inspired us all," he said. "I just wish he was alive to see this day of freedom. We are committed now. We must either be free or Gaddafi will come back and kill us all."
Al Shuwehdy hopes she will one day go on trial for her crimes, but believes her day of reckoning may come before that.
"Her place is in Tripoli now next to the colonel. His supporters have a chance to show that they can die bravely with him. Huda lived her life as a loyalist to him. She may have no choice now but to die a loyalist for him too."
