Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was so vain and paranoid that he declined a full anaesthetic during cosmetic surgery because he feared he might be assassinated, two Brazilian doctors have revealed.
Disclosing a secret they have held for 16 years, Liacyr Ribeiro and Fabio Naccache have described how they flew secretly to Libya in 1994 to perform facial procedures and a hair transplant on the Libyan dictator.
“He wanted to look younger, he thought he was getting old,” Dr Naccache told The Times. “He had a good head of hair, but some bald areas, which I tidied up.”
Dr Ribeiro said Colonel Gaddafi told them that he wanted to look like he did at 28, when he led the coup that took him to power. “He didn’t want young people to see him as an old man,” he told the Brazilian magazine Epoca.
Colonel Gaddafi asked for only a local anaesthetic during four hours of surgery and remained lucid, chatting to the surgical team. He even insisted on a break so everyone could eat hamburgers and sip fizzy drinks.
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The surgeons’ cloak and dagger account of their work in Libya began with an approach to Dr Ribeiro by a man who said he was Libya’s health minister and asked if Dr Ribeiro would speak at a Pan-Arab plastic surgery conference in Tripoli in 1994.
After agreeing to travel to Libya to give his lecture, Dr Ribeiro was taken to a bunker to meet “a dear person” and left in a library.
He was expecting to meet the health minister’s wife, but to his surprise was told: “You are going to examine our leader.”
He consulted Colonel Gaddafi alone in a tent inside the dictator’s redoubt.
Colonel Gaddafi declined the full facelift the surgeon suggested and requested a more “natural intervention”.
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The dictator then announced: “Let’s do the operation today.” But Dr Ribeiro succeeded in convincing him to delay it for a few months’ preparation.
Dr Ribeiro returned to Tripoli with Dr Naccache, the hair transplant specialist. The operation took place in a private operating theatre fully equipped with the most modern technology.
The Libyan dictator insisted the doctors stay three days to monitor his recuperation. Then he told Dr Ribeiro: “This place, without women and drink, must be a sacrifice for you. You can go.”
En route to the Tunisian frontier, Dr Ribeiro began to fear for his life after having carried out an operation that Colonel Gaddafi would surely want kept secret. “I thought, now I’m dead.”
But the surgeons later received a “present” from the Libyan Health Ministry: an envelope stuffed with cash.
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Dr Ribeiro also works in Naples but declined to confirm reports that one of his clients was the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.