Huda Ben Amer

Huda Ben Amer is a Libyan politician. A follower of the Libyan ruler, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, she is currently the Secretary of the General People's Congress of Inspection People's Control and was mayor of Benghazi until the 2011 Libyan uprising.

Ben Amer was born in Al Marg near Benghazi and attended the Garyounis University in Benghazi. Belonging to a poor family without influence, Ben Amer rose to national prominence at a public execution staged by the Gaddafi government in 1984. The event in Benghazi's basketball stadium had been announced as the trial of one of Gaddaffi's political enemies, Al-Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy, an engineer who had been peacefully campaigning against the Colonel's rule. But instead the schoolchildren and students who had been assembled for the purpose were made to see Al-Shuwehdy's execution by hanging. While the hanged man writhed on the gallows, Ben Amer stepped forward and grabbed Al-Shuwehdy's legs, pulling him down until he stopped struggling and died.

That display of ruthlessness, about which she later liked to boast - she is remembered in Benghazi by her saying "we don't need talking, we need hangings" – earned her the enduring loathing of the people of Benghazi and the nickname Huda Al-Shannaga – Huda the executioner. However, it impressed Gaddafi, who had been watching the execution on live TV. He subsequently promoted Ben Amer to high government posts, including twice mayor of Benghazi and a leading member of the Legan Thwria, Gaddaffi's organization of revolutionary committees. Eventually she became a favorite of Gaddaffi, and one of the richest and most powerful women in Libya.

In the course of the national uprising in early 2011, a crowd stormed Ben Amer's sprawling mansion in Benghazi and, finding her gone, burned it to the ground. Later in March 2011, she was seen next to Gaddaffi on one of his televised addresses.