A 39-YEAR-OLD Dutch former Playboymodel is under investigation by police in the Netherlands over allegations she was involved in the trafficking of women as "escorts" to members of the Gadafy regime in Libya.
Talitha van Zon, who met Muammar Gadafy’s son Mutassim in an Italian nightclub in 2004 and became his girlfriend, has gone on Dutch radio to deny the allegations. Last month she jumped from a hotel balcony in Tripoli and escaped the country in a last-minute evacuation arranged by the Hungarian embassy.
The charges were filed in Amsterdam by a former girlfriend of Ms van Zon’s who travelled with her on that last trip to Tripoli just as the Gadafy stranglehold began to crumble. The girlfriend claims she was raped there by Mutassim Gadafy and reported the alleged rape to the Dutch police. She subsequently filed the people-trafficking charges against Ms van Zon, claiming she had been the most recent in a long line of women brought to Tripoli to fund the former centrefold’s luxury lifestyle.
Ms van Zon, however, told a different story in her radio interview. She said it was she who had advised her friend to go to the police, tell them what happened and press charges against Mr Gadafy.
Ms van Zon’s friend remains anonymous, but her lawyer Bram Moszkowicz said he believed Ms van Zon had been arrested early yesterday morning by Dutch military police in connection with his client’s allegations. Neither the military police nor the public prosecutor’s office would comment last night.
However, there have been media reports that Ms van Zon was been investigated and watched by the Dutch Secret Service for some time because of her known links to the Gadafys – and the possibility that she might have been with Mutassim Gadafy when the family fled.
Dutch war correspondent Arnold Karskens, who said Ms van Zon pleaded with him in Tripoli for help to get on board the ship the Hungarian embassy was using to evacuate non-nationals to Malta, said she had been very secretive about her activities in Libya. “She was afraid of the rebels because of her association with the Gadafy clan, so she was desperate to escape – but even in Malta she was incredibly unwilling to talk, as if she had something to hide,” Karskens said.
In a newspaper interview when she returned to Amsterdam, Ms van Zon described her last meeting with Mutassim Gadafy before she fled her Tripoli hotel.
“He had a beard. He was sitting on a couch strewn with automatic weapons. And he was guarded by unsmiling 16-year-old boys with submachine guns,” she recalled.
“He worshipped his father. He talked a lot about Hitler, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez. He liked leaders who had a lot of power. He always said: ‘I want to do better than my father’.” She said Mutassim had also praised his late brother, Saif al-Arab Gadafy – Col Gadafy’s youngest son – who was killed in a Nato bombing raid in April, calling him “a martyr”.