No record of adopted daughter

Press, 19 April 1986, Page 10

No record of adopted daughter

NZPA-AP Rome The Libyan report this week that an infant adopted daughter of the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, was killed in the American air raids was the first word for many that he had an eighth child. Like much else in his tightly controlled desert country, details of Colonel Gadaffi’s personal life are cloaked in secrecy. In recent months he did lift the curtain a little to Westerners, when he invited six women journalists to meet some of his family in the tent where he conducts business and entertains world leaders. When the journalists arrived for the interview on a moonlit January night

five children crowded round. They were cheerful, cute, and curious about the foreigners. Colonel Gadaffi’s wife, Safia, who he said was 32, was also there. She has wide, friendly eyes; she wore a long brown dress and sat with a child on her lap on the floor. Straw mats covered the ground. Colonel Gadaffi said he had tnet Safia, his second wife, when he was recuperating from an appendectomy shortly after he took power in a coup in 1969. He was a 27-year-old Army signal corps captain. He said she was a young nursing student at the hospital and that it was love at first sight. He divorced his first wife, but her name is unknown.

The children in the tent were introduced as his only daughter, Aisha, aged 8; Kabir, aged 13; Saadi, aged 12; Saif, aged 4; and Khamis, aged 3. Nothing was said about an adopted infant daughter. The Libyans reported that the two youngest boys were injured in the United States raids and were in hospital. The Libyan leader had two sons by his first wife, but their names are not known.

During the interview, Colonel Gadaffi said that he would like all his children, especially Aisha, to become doctors because his older brothers and sisters had died from malaria.

“I hope all of them will be doctors to help all the

poor people in Africa,” he said.

He said Aisha had such aspirations. She stayed to watch the journalists long after the boys had gone outside to play.

His children were normal children who went to normal schools, he told the journalists, who with persistent questioning pried out some information from the colonel about his family life. The oldest son, Kabir, was spotted earlier this year in training at a boys military academy in Tripoli. Safia described herself as a housewife. She stopped wearing the traditional Muslim veil several years ago at Colonel Gadaffi’s request, al-

though many country' women wear it.

She said she mainly dealt with family and rarely discussed work with her husband, although she had occasionally gone with him on State trips in the Arab world.

"I don’t like politics,” she said. Colonel Gadaffi said he was very close to his family and was openly affectionate with them, although he conceded his job left him little time to help his children with homework.

Sometimes he hunts, rides and practises falconry with the boys. “We eat together and sleep together,” he said of his family.