Flghts From Gva To Lhr

With Gaddafi (Nearly) Gone Terrorism Victims Seek Justice, Or Compensation

Maria del Carmen Diaz was just 15 years old when terrorists in Tel Aviv's Lod airport lobbed grenades at her Puerto Rican tour group on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, killing her aunt and severely wounding her. Six surgeries and 39 years of intense therapy later, she still gets nervous talking about the attack. “I couldn't understand what was happening. I thought it was a nightmare,” del Carmen Diaz told TIME, the first time she's ever told her story publicly. “It lasted only four minutes but for me it was an eternity. People were screaming, crying. There were explosions, gunshots.”

Though she'd never heard of him before that day, she soon came to know a lot about the man responsible for the attack: Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi at the time was only two years into his 42-year bloody reign. For decades, Gaddafi funded extremists in Ireland and the Philippines, in Palestine and, even, Saudi Arabia. He went so far right that he gave millions of dollars to uber nationalist politicians – the anti-Muslim, pro-Arian kind – in Austria and Serbia. He even tried to finance aboriginal and Maori revolts in Australia and New Zealand.

In the last decade, Gaddafi has overhauled his image, as his former prime minister put it in 2004, “paying for peace.” He apologized for the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing, set up a $2.7 billion fund for victims, and extradited two of the suspected terrorists responsible. He took responsibility for the 1984 killing of Yvonne Fletcher, a British policewoman shot – along with 11 others – during a protest in front of the Libyan embassy in London. These steps helped win him renewed relations with Great Britain. Two years later, or more importantly six days after U.S. troops dug his buddy Saddam Hussein out of his hole, he renounced all programs to make weapons of mass destruction, which helped get him off of George W. Bush's axis of evil list in 2006.

But Gaddafi's five minutes as a statesman were brief. And now that his regime has fallen, everyone wants a piece of the twine that will make up his noose. “I would love to him stand trial in the criminal court for all the things he's done and all the death and murder so many people like my aunt and me and my friends that were there,” del Carmen Diaz says. “I'm elated.” And it's not just him. Gaddafi's legacy of terrorism has spawned a cast of characters who are much sought after by the rest of the world. If they can't get a pound of Gaddafi's flesh – which the Libyan people have first dibs on – they will settle for others responsible, simply finding out the truth of what happened and some of Gaddafi's money.

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