Grandpa, family man, playmate . . . dictator

A doting grandfather and his granddaughter at play – it is a classic image of domestic harmony that could grace the pages of any family album across the world.

A newly discovered video of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi with his grandchildren shows the fallen dictator relaxing in surroundings a little less formal than his usual image.

“Do you not love me?” the former “Brother Leader” asks one of his grand-daughters, who wriggles away from him as he sits down next to her in one of the tents in his Tripoli compound and strokes her hair.

“No” she says firmly in the video, believed to have been shot in 2005 and obtained from a source in Tripoli, where the Bab al-Aziziya compound was ransacked late last month as rebels over-ran the capital.

“Then do you hate me? Am I not good? Am I not sweet?” says Gaddafi, dressed in a white tracksuit top. “No,” she replies, pointing towards the camera when he insists she tells him who it is that is sweet.

The girl then puts her hand over his mouth and tweaks his nose and forehead, giggling as he babbles through her hand.

After repeated prompting, she gives him a thumbs up and he asks who told her to, reminding her that last time he had asked it had been a thumbs down.

The backdrop is strikingly informal, with none of luxury goods that littered the swanky seaside compound of his son Saadi Gaddafi when rebels broke it open last month – it was Saadi Gaddafi who shot the video of his daughter and father together.

Plastic sheeting covers the floor, Gaddafi sits on a divan covered in quilts on which the girl’s young brother lies sleeping.

Saadi Gaddafi told CNN on Monday he was a “little bit outside” the desert town of Bani Walid, one of the last remaining strongholds of Gaddafi supporters now besieged by his opponents, and was trying to bring peace despite “aggressive” talk from his brother Saif.

The Gaddafi photographs fell into the hands of reporters late last month, showing the dictator with other leaders such as Castro and Nasser, and others posed with members of his family.

Watching the video, it is easy to forget that you are seeing a man who, after 42 years of rule, left a trail of corpses and torture chambers in his wake.

In another film with the same grandchildren, Gaddafi lies on a sofa while they climb around him. “It is the ghost, we will kill it,” he says, asking his wife to bring him a pistol to shoot an imaginary figure. “I am a ghost,” says his granddaughter to which Gaddafi replies: “We will kill you if you are the ghost.”