Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat. Alex Crawford

are offered medical gowns as a disguise. There is a fear in the hospital that the army is not beyond storming this place to look for us or recover its injured or dead soldiers. We take the gowns gratefully and greedily – grasping at anything which might offer us some protection, however slight. We rush to put them on, but we feel odd and look faintly ridiculous.

      The doctors have even given us medical facemasks in an attempt to hide our European look. Martin and I try these on with the rest of the new kit while Tim is outside making a call on the satellite phone. And then we take them off again. Deep down we realize that if it gets to the stage of the army entering the hospital it’s probably curtains for us all anyway.

      Some of the Opposition fighters are already wearing medical gowns and many of them don’t inspire us with confidence. One in particular, we think, is trying to persuade us to hand over our precious pictures. Is he just masquerading as a rebel? Is he really a government stooge? Are we becoming paranoid? A few of the rebel fighters appear to be staying in the hospital because they feel a little bit safer. But, to be honest, everyone is a ‘rebel’ here.

      There isn’t a single person we talk to who doesn’t castigate Gaddafi, his forces or his sons. They are coping with the consequences of his heartlessness. They are patching up the broken bones, torn ligaments and cracked skulls of their neighbours in Zawiya, their relatives and their friends. If they were rabidly or even slightly pro-Gaddafi before this onslaught, it isn’t hard to understand why they have done a handbrake turn, changing their minds and attitudes.

      We are repeatedly urged by those in the hospital to see and film the growing number of injured – in the Intensive Care Unit and in the general wards. Martin and I are taken to the basement to see a row of dead Gaddafi soldiers. The bodies are in a quite horrible state but the medics want to show us they are not Libyan. ‘These are not Libyan faces,’ one tells us. ‘See, they are from Chad or Niger – mercenaries.’

      I’m not sure how they are so certain about their nationalities, but there’s no question they do look very different from the Libyan faces we see all around us. The medics keep on stressing this point to us – that these people are not from Libya. It is important to them. Fellow Libyans would find it much harder, find it abhorrent to fire on their own. At least that seems to be their thinking. But, in their minds, Gaddafi is showing his utter contempt for Libyan life, demonstrating his savagery and confirming his madness by buying in mercenaries to kill his own people. They insist Gaddafi forces have entered the hospital in the past and taken away their injured and dead. It sounds preposterous. I am ashamed to say I write this off as paranoia. I don’t quite believe it. But again I note the growing feelings of paranoia inside myself at the same time. I have been in Libya for a little over two days. These people have lived with the dictator for forty-two years.

      We go about our various tasks. Tim is urgently trying to find someone who can drive us out of Zawiya and is in constant communication with the London office. Martin is still being taken round the wards to see the range of horrible injuries. I go down to the front entrance, where the accident and emergency department is. I just want to see what’s going on there.

      There’s a crowd at the hospital entrance, gatherings of doctors and nurses and plenty of other people too. The hospital has turned into the main meeting area aside from Martyrs’ Square. The entrance is also packed with hospital beds on wheels – ready for the next round of casualties. Martin has joined me by now. Then we hear the rumble of traffic. We see a convoy of military vehicles driving along the road running parallel to the A&E’s entrance. The army is heading back into Zawiya to give the people in the Square another pounding. Within minutes we hear the sound of shelling and rockets firing. All those people we left behind – in the mosque, in the Square, in the hotel – are under attack again. We can’t have been here in the hospital for much more than half an hour. It crosses my mind that if we hadn’t jumped in that ambulance when we did, we would still be in the thick of it.

      Now, as we’re making our way through the hospital corridors, the staff are greeting us, nodding appreciatively, catching our eyes and occasionally saying things like: ‘Welcome, welcome,’ and ‘Thank you, Sky News.’ Everyone seems to know who we are.

      The doctor’s tiny room has turned into our ‘office’. We’re brought thick, strong coffee, bread and butter, some juice in cartons. It sounds bland, but to us it’s a feast. A stream of doctors come in to say hello, talk, give us their views on the regime and offer advice on how to get the pictures out. Martin is getting increasingly concerned about battery power and about filling up his memory cards. Once they are full of pictures he has recorded, he will have to decide whether to record over earlier material – so erasing it for ever. The alternative is not filming anything further. But that’s no choice at all really. We aren’t there yet, though. Still, he has to be very selective now about what he films. We can’t afford to waste either battery power or space on our cards.

      The ‘rebel’ we don’t trust is in the little room a lot too. He is doing much of the talking and handing out advice on what to do with our film cards. ‘Give the cards to me and I will try to smuggle them out,’ he tells us. ‘You are going to get stopped at the checkpoints because you are Westerners. I will find a way to get them out.’ My instant reaction is: ‘No way.’ I don’t want to hand over our cards – our gold dust – to anyone and certainly not to this young guy that we don’t know, who may or may not be a rebel. But I don’t say anything and neither does Martin. We just nod and listen to what he is saying.

      We are constantly discussing what route we can use to get out. We still have no transport but we’re just investigating how, where, when – all prefaced by a very big if. It’s best to accentuate the positive. We just need some sort of plan, and planning means we have less time to think about how we don’t have a vehicle or anyone to take us anywhere just yet. Right now we are well and truly stuck in Zawiya. Everyone here is. And there’s no paddle.

      I suggest trying to go out westwards through the Tunisian border – a long and difficult journey as the government still has control of the route. There have been constant battles between the Opposition fighters and the Gaddafi troops. The rebels are having sporadic success at best in securing control of the southern border post, only to lose it to the regime days – sometimes hours – later.

      Tim is vehement that this is not a goer. He has just returned from covering the mass exodus of refugees streaming out of Libya via Tunisia. ‘It’s too difficult a journey and once we get to the border – if we get to the border – there are thousands and thousands of people trying to cross. I’m telling you, it’s a bad idea.’

      The other way is to try to make our way out through the desert scrub towards the oil refinery just outside Zawiya. There’s been fighting there too but one of the doctors says he has a house nearby that we can stay in. No, no, I’m thinking, surely that area is going to be crawling with military, and even if we make it there, then what?

      What about heading east towards Tripoli? It’s the shortest route and there is an airport, but Plan C is also fraught with problems. For a start there’s the headquarters of the Khamis Brigade to negotiate, the most notorious wing of the Libyan military regime. The 32nd Brigade is colloquially named after Gaddafi’s favoured son and the Colonel has made sure it has been well funded over the years. Its barracks are just outside Zawiya on the road to Tripoli. The brigade is feared throughout Libya for its ferocity and interrogation methods.

      We’re also worried that the regime and its minders at the Rixos Hotel will be on the lookout for us. They know by now that there are three foreign journalists in Zawiya and they won’t like what we have to say about what’s being going on inside the city. They are already mounting a campaign of denial about my telephone reporting, saying it is lies and now out of date. But we have the first independent evidence that Gaddafi is attacking unarmed civilians. The regime knows it and will want to suppress it.

      I am getting lots of texts now. A number of people and several news teams are urgently trying to get us out, help us or at the very least offer some moral support. The experienced journalists inside and outside Sky News realize we are in a desperately difficult position. Sky’s chief correspondent, Stuart Ramsay, who is a veteran