THIS CAUGHT MORE THAN ONE EYE;
Col Gadaffi, who has been in power since 1969, has suggested he might join the protests himself, the BBC's Jon Leyne reports.
BIZARRE BUT FITS RIGHT IN...
Rome has had its fair share of triumphant parades by bizarre tyrants in its long history.
And the ageing Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's arrival on Monday ranked alongside any grotesque ceremony staged by Caligula or Nero.
It is easy to see why Italy's Left-wing opposition denounced the dictator's reception by Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi as a 'rock star welcome'.
Gaddafi's arrived in Rome with a 300-strong retinue on three Airbuses. As ever, he brought with him a giant Bedouin tent, which was erected in a park in the centre of the city and where he was to stay and conduct business.
There was no immediate sign of the camel he took on a visit to Paris in 2007 when he pitched his tent in the grounds of a five-star hotel.
With gelled and carefully dyed hair, the Colonel was made up to look like a cross between Michael Jackson and the deranged music mogul murderer Phil Spector.
Pinned to his chest was a large photograph of a Libyan resistance leader being hanged by Italian colonialists in 1931.
Although with his peaked cap, red flashes, gold braid epaulettes and an array of military decorations that resembled a Dulux colour chart, he turned out in a uniform that Italy's last tyrant, fascist leader Benito Mussolini, would have killed for.
But it was the gun-toting female bodyguards in their khaki uniforms and red berets in the 67-year old dictator's entourage, girls who wear Kalashnikovs like Gucci fashion accessories, who stole the show.
Gaddafi is one of the maddest dictators on Earth and he doesn't like being upstaged - unless it's by this 40-strong troupe of well-equipped, allvirgin minders.
He may have conducted his 1969 military coup against Lybia's last monarch, King Idris, under an Islamic revolutionary banner. He may have proclaimed himself a pioneer of 'Islamic socialism'. But Gaddafi's female security detail don't hide their charms under a burqa.
Bizarrely, he claims them to be a symbol of his belief in female emancipation. 'Women should be trained for combat, so that they do not become easy prey for their enemies,' he says.
All of his girls are said to swear an oath that they will give their lives for him and it is claimed they never leave his side, night or day, and he insists they remain virgins. There is no shortage of volunteers for what is seen as a prestigious job.
A special training college puts recruits through a tough physical programme and girls who don't drop out emerge as trained killers, experts in firearms and martial arts.
Gaddafi makes the final selection and, despite his insistence that his guards are chaste, rumours abound that he demands their sexual favours.
The girls wear lipstick, jewellery, polished nails, even high heels - but their armed combat training has been tested more than once.
In 1998 one of them was killed and seven others wounded when Islamic fundamentalists in Libya ambushed the Colonel's motorcade. The dead girl, Aisha, rumoured to be his favourite, threw herself across Gaddafi's body to stop the bullets.
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