IT TAKES just one question to find the house of the Buhidma family in Salmani, in eastern Benghazi. Ask for the home of “shaheed [martyr] Buhidma” and you will be directed past crumbling buildings to a modest dwelling where the distraught mother and father of Abdul Kareem Buhidma grieve for their son.
Abdul Kareem was a 20-year-old economics student due to graduate later this year. Like many of Benghazi’s youth he flocked to join the anti-regime protests that erupted on February 17th. The defining battle in the fall to the opposition of this, Libya’s second largest city, took place at the katiba, a sprawling military compound in central Benghazi. More than 100 unarmed demonstrators were killed in three days of clashes. One of them was Abdul Kareem.
“We went together that day to join the protests at the katiba,” recalls his brother Bilqasim, a 19-year-old high school student. “We were not afraid . . . But then the army started attacking us. I remember bullets flying everywhere and the smell of burning. I saw Abdul Kareem crouch down briefly and when he stood up again a bullet hit him under his right eye. Some people helped me lift him into a car to go to the hospital, but he didn’t make it. He died a few hours later.”
Bilqasim remains so traumatised by the killing that he speaks in a hoarse whisper with his head bowed low. A woman in the room tells him he should hold his head high because his brother died a martyr.
His mother Aida, her eyes swollen from crying, pulls her shawl around her as her body convulses with sobs. “I want to die too just to be with him,” she says. “May God help us.”
Her husband Saleh, a tall man of 80 dressed in brown robes, cannot even speak about his dead son without breaking down.
Abdul Kareem’s stepbrother Hussein Hamed has lived in Ireland since claiming political asylum in 1998. He ran as an Independent in Dublin South in the general election.
The family has suffered much under the Gadafy regime. Hussein, who studied in Dublin in the 1980s, fled Libya as a result of persecution due to his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood. His brother Mahmoud spent seven years in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison and was tortured for suspected political activity.
The Buhidma family say they want revenge for the death of their son and brother. “I want to catch the people who killed Abdul Kareem with my own hands,” says Bilqasim.
All pray that the protests that have swept away Gadafy’s writ in Libya’s eastern flank will continue towards Tripoli ousting the man who has ruled the country with an iron grip for more than four decades.
“We will bring him down,” says Mahmoud. “And then we will punish him. We cannot live happily until we see this man, this animal, dead.”