Golf buggies and a pink bathroom: inside Gaddafi’s tunnels

The first thing you see as you push in through the wreckage of Colonel Gaddafi‘s office building in his Tripoli compound is not the tunnel entrance.

No – it’s the mini-submarine, obviously. Or perhaps the US cluster bomb pod thoughtfully suspended from a scaffold in the main hall.

Expect the weird then multiply by a factor of something big – that’s the Bab al-Aziziya compound for you.

But that’s just above ground. Go down into the tunnels reaching out from here and it’s a world where above-ground weird just goes full-on bonkers.

The paranoid walls above, matched by life underground.

For the first thing we come upon is what we think at first is just an office. But hang on, what’s with the Beta professional videotapes lying around the place?

It’s dusty, totally dark beyond headtorch beam, and blown apart by a Nato bunkerbuster. But you can make out studio TV camera grips lying in the dust.

There’s a robotic automated camera plan for a TV studio from a company in Chertsey, Surrey.

Along another tunnel, a green room area with sofa and comfy chairs; there’s a kitchen with spuds awaiting the peeler who never came; and a bathroom.

Another tunnel – and here’s the mainframe computer housing behind its vast blast-proof door. Another tunnel and there’s the studio. 20 feet or more underground – yet still pierced by a bomb. Banks of tape players, silenced forever.

All in all, just the sort of place a dictator could come to and address his own people at zero personal risk. So now perhaps we know at last where all those long TV speeches were put together.

Gulf buggies and apartments

On and on it goes. Many of the tunnels easily big enough to take the golf buggy lying trashed in the darkness.

Our explorations take us far from the main office with its odd collection of subs and bombs.

At one point, we end up in a major underground apartment, complete with pink bathroom and a tub that would take six people in comfort.

A wardrobe full of clothes comes into our torch beams.

Our translator shouts: “Ah! These are Saif’s clothes. Saif Gaddafi. I saw them on the TV.”

Underground hideaway

Could we really have stumbled into the underground hideaway of the colonel’s son?

It seems so. Of course, being underground, we’d no idea where we were. All we knew was that it was getting hot in here. Seriously hot.

We soon found out why – over our heads there was a giant palace collapsed into itself. And that missile strike was recent. So recent that as we moved on through the wreckage we realised it was still smouldering.

Back above ground and there – sure enough – a large concrete palace completely pancaked in on itself.

Yes, at ground level here in Libya things are just mildly weird, I suppose. Down below it is a world of total wackiness.