‘Rape victim’ speaks of death threats

A LIBYAN woman who says she is the person who burst into a Tripoli hotel to tell foreign journalists that she had been gang raped by Muammar Gaddafi’s troops told a CNN interviewer she is out of custody but is receiving death threats from regime loyalists.

CNN said it was confident that the woman interviewed is in fact Iman al-Obeidi, who made international headlines on March 26 when she was dragged away from the Rixos Hotel by government agents as she screamed her allegations of rape to foreign reporters.

The CNN interviewer, Anderson Cooper, said the network could not be certain the woman they spoke to by telephone is al-Obeidi, but they were satisfied it was her after days of research. She spoke in Arabic through a female translator, but was not shown on camera.