Porn, a carousel and photos of Condoleezza Rice: Inside Gadhafi's opulent palace

Once they would have been arrested for daring to look at the homes of the Gadhafi family. Yesterday ordinary Libyans were able to walk straight in to the grand houses abandoned by the fleeing dictator and his children, and help themselves to trappings of wealth beyond the imagination of most.

Many expressed disbelief at the sheer vulgarity of it all, with gold and marble fittings on display everywhere; others saw touches of insanity in the Gadhafi clan’s bizarre personal tastes.

One of the first Gadhafi residences to be looted was the beachfront home of his son, Al-Saadi, 38, where a white Lamborghini was among four cars that swiftly disappeared as Tripoli fell earlier this week.

A BMW, an Audi and a Toyota were also liberated by the rebels from a garage decorated with a mural of a yellow sports car.

In a study, piles of catalogues for yachts and cars lay abandoned. One brochure had a yellow handwritten Post-it note on the front, listing the price for a 100-foot yacht as seven million euros. A DVD of homosexual pornography was also among his possessions. Seifallah Gneidi, 23, took a large bottle of gin, a toothbrush with a gilded handle and a pair of Diesel jeans from the villa.

“We wanted to have the stuff that he had,” said the rebel fighter.

A short distance across town in the western suburb of Nofleen, the villa of Al-Saadi’s sister, Aisha, 36, proved that money can buy you many things, but it cannot buy you taste.

In a circular entrance hall rebels took turns to be photographed sitting on a gold-painted sofa in the shape of a mermaid.

Lying on the floor nearby, a carrier bag from the London toy store Hamleys lay next to abandoned children’s clothes and a pink travel cot.

“I can’t even believe what I am seeing,” said Muftah Shubri, a local resident, as he stared at the indoor swimming pool, a small inflatable children’s dinghy still floating in the water. But it was Col. Gadhafi's own Bab al-Azizia compound, now a base for the rebel fighters, that held the greatest surprises.

A house where the dictator’s adopted daughter, Hanaa, was killed in a U.S. bombing raid in 1986 had been turned into a shrine, with glass cases built over her bed and other items of furniture to preserve them exactly as they were immediately after the attack.

The most incongruous sight of all in the “House of Resistance”, as Gadhafi called the bombed-out building, was that of several dummy missiles hanging from the ceiling as if they had just fallen from an American bomber - his idea of a memorial to the little girl, perhaps.

Outside, Gadhafi had built his own fairground, complete with carousel and spinning teacups, in an unlikely echo of Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch.

And despite his apparent hatred of American politicians, Gaddafi’s personal effects suggested that he might have had a soft spot for one of them: looters discovered an album filled with pictures of him meeting Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. secretary of state.

source: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Porn+carousel+photos+Condoleezza+Rice+Inside+Gadhafi+opulent+palace/5308145/story.html#ixzz1W8XhwcGb