Shweyga Mullah sat timidly in the ambulance, without saying a word, but her expressive brown eyes shone sadly through her burnt skin, projecting the tale of her cruel torture under the Gaddafi family.
The 30-year-old Ethiopian nanny, who arrived in Malta from Misurata yesterday, worked for one of the sons of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. She suffered burns all over her body when her “master’s” wife poured boiling water over her head because she refused to beat his daughter.
Ms Mullah will be treated for her burns and injuries at Mater Dei Hospital.
Wearing a blue surgical cap over her bandaged head, she slowly walked off the private chartered plane with the assistance of a nurse and headed towards the ambulance that waited for her on the runway.
Despite her scalded skin, her once untainted beauty still seeped through her scarred face.
“She’s a very reserved and very quiet person. She’s been through quite a lot as one can imagine,” said the defence director at the Office of the Prime Minister, Vanessa Frazier, who was on the same flight.
Ms Frazier said the chartered flight had gone to Libya with a delegation of Maltese people. The point of the trip was to help the new Libyan government re-open their seaports and airports to commercial traffic and there were no set plans to bring Ms Mullah to Malta on the return flight.
She said the government had been working on trying to bring her to Malta for treatment for several weeks. Following consultations with Ms Mullah’s doctors, it was decided that she be brought to Malta yesterday.
“She was very gracious (during the flight)... She was very emotional about leaving Libya because it’s a chapter in her life that is closing.... She is grateful that she is being given the opportunity to start a new life and be given the medical treatment she deserves that includes plastic surgery and psychological assistance,” Ms Frazier said.
She said Ms Mullah did not have travelling documents but, with the help of the US Embassy in Malta, the Maltese government applied for a passport for her through the Ethiopian Embassy in Cairo. The passport was on its way to Malta.
Asked if Ms Mullah would be granted asylum, Ms Frazier said it was entirely her choice whether or not to apply. CNN reported that Ms Mullah would like to go home to her family in Ethiopia.
Her blistered body became a shocking but familiar site around the world when she described her ordeal on CNN in August.
A year ago, Ms Mullah left her home country to work as a nanny with the young daughter and son of Hannibal Gaddafi and his wife Aline Skaf. Shortly after rebels took over Tripoli, she was found abandoned in a room at one of the family’s luxury seaside villas in the west of the capital. Her entire body was covered in “weeping scabs” after she was scalded by the wife.
Ms Mullah told CNN the wife, an aspiring model, lost her temper when her daughter would not stop crying and she refused to beat the child. “She took me to a bathroom. She tied my hands behind my back and tied my feet. She taped my mouth and she started pouring boiling water on my head,” CNN reported her saying, adding that Ms Mullah was burned on two occasions.