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  Date / Time: 9/24/2009 3:46 AM UTC

  Libyan leader's 'gun girls': Moammar Khadafy travels with
  

  Monday, September 21st 2009, 11:27 AM

  

  Charlier/AP

  Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy is flanked by his 'gun girls,' women bodyguards that he travels with.

  

  Along with live weapons, the guards carry with them their bad-girl reputation.

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  WASHINGTON -- Libya's "Brotherly Leader" Moammar Khadafy will be invading midtown Manhattan this week surrounded by a gang of fetching "gun girls."

  The dictator's pistol-packin' posse of 40 to 50 women bodyguards -- sometimes called his "Amazon Guard" -- will be part of his massive 150-member traveling traveling entourage for the UN General Assembly session, U.S. officials said.

  Along with live weapons, the guards will bring their bad-girl reputation.

  In 2003, the women -- smartly outfitted in form-fitting desert camouflage uniforms and blue berets -- caused a pushing-and-shoving ruckus when Khadafy got in a shouting match with Saudi Arabians at an Arab summit.

  The bodyguards also formed a menacing circle around Khadafy in Rome last June after 900 Italian women unleashed a chorus of boos in response to his admonition not to drive without their husbands' permission.

  For this week's visit -- his first to the U.S. -- Khadafy stirred up American anger in advance by arm-twisting Britains to win freedom for the Lockerbie bomber and giving the terrorist a hero's welcome in Libya.

  There was more aggravation over his wish to stay in a Bedouin tent in Central Park or Englewood, N.J. Instead, Khadafy will bed down at the Libyan mission in Manhattan with his gal goons around him.

  Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said Khadafy's security detail should not be a problem.

  "We deal with difficult heads of state all the time," Rice said of the supposedly reformed Khadafy, a former patron of terror groups from the Philippines to Belfast. Other head-case leaders coming this week are Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

  Rice noted that Americans were incensed over the release from a Scottish prison of Abdelbase al-Meghrahi, convicted in the Pan Am 103 bombing that killed 270 people in 1988.

  "How President Khadafy chooses to comport himself has the potential either to further aggravate those feelings and emotions or not," she said.

  Maria Haberfeld, a specialist in police training and counter-terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called Khadafy's visit "a nightmare for the NYPD," but predicted his security force will be held in check.

  "They are entitled to bring their own security," Haberfeld said of the Libyans. "But they will be subject to the operational priorities of the NYPD and not their own."

  Khadafy used to rely on East German gunmen to protect him against the occassional assassination attempt back in the 1980s.

  The all-woman Libyan force made its debut in the 1990s as part of the what Khadafy called a campaign to raise the status of women in the Arab world.

  He has stuck by them, though he can't seem to settle upon a uniform.

  Sometimes, they're in olive drab. In Brussels a few years back, they wore blue-and-black outfits with white shirts and black ties, topped by black berets. Occasionally, they're in all black, accessorized by sand-colored cartridge belts and holsters

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