Filipino servants wearing spotless white jackets mixed his favourite Jack Daniels whisky and coke, and then Mutassim Gaddafi raised his glass and toasted the victory that he was sure was close.
Relaxing in one of his Tripoli homes just over a week ago, during a break from commanding at the front, the fifth son of Libya's deposed ruler was in a defiant mood. Soon, he boasted to the blonde foreigner sitting with him, he would lead his father's regime to a victory over the "rats".
The woman at his side was Mutassim's ex-girlfriend, Talitha van Zon, a Dutch glamour model who still regularly visited him in the Libyan capital. Her most recent trip last week, however, proved to be a far cry from the luxury break she was used to. As the Libyan regime crumbled and her male companion took flight, she endured several days of terror as battles raged around her five-star hotel.
On Wednesday, The Sunday Telegraph found her alone and frightened in a Tripoli hospital, where she was being treated for injuries after leaping from a hotel balcony - apparently fearful that rebels were about to burn her alive. Before she was evacuated by a humanitarian ship to Malta on Friday, she gave an extraordinary account of the final days of the Gaddafi regime, providing an insight into a family who will fight to the death and destroy their country before they give up power.
"I was shocked when I met Mutassim. He had changed," said Miss van Zon. "It was the first time I had seen him since just before the February uprising. He had a beard, he was sitting on a couch strewn with automatic weapons, and he was guarded by unsmiling 16-year-old boys with sub-machine guns." On the wall behind was a huge portrait of his father, Muammar Gaddafi.
As he swirled his whisky in the glass, ice chinking, Mutassim spoke of envying his brother Saif al-Arab, who was "martyred" in a Nato bombing in late April. Libya's war had turned Mutassim from the likeable playboy Miss van Zom knew from the nightclubs of Europe into a ruthless warrior.
"His eyes were cold," she said. "He looked capable of killing someone, and he hadn't looked like that before. I asked myself, not for the first time, 'What the hell am I doing in Libya?'?"
A former Playboy centrefold, Miss van Zon met Mutassim in an Italian nightclub in 2004, kindling a three-month relationship that ended when she learned that she "was not the only woman in his life".
But the girl from Rotterdam remained friends with the son of the powerful Arab leader, and as their friendship blossomed, she was drawn into a fabulous private world of luxury, showered with gifts and invited to some of the world's most exclusive destinations.
In Monaco she was taken to the Grand Prix and a dinner party attended by Princess Caroline. At Christmas, there was Mutassim's annual excursion to the Caribbean island of Saint Barts, with his entourage flown in his private Boeing. When Mutassim was in Paris or London he would book several floors of the most expensive hotels, filling them with his friends, and the finest Italian hairdressers would be flown in from Italy, at euros 5,000 a time.
"I asked him once how much he spent, and he took a minute to add it up in his head," Miss van Zon recalled. "He said 'about $2 million'. I said, 'You mean a year?' He said 'No - a month'."
Mutassim, who is aged around 35, was fun, likeable, hedonistic, loyal to his friends and generous. He showered Miss van Zon with presents, giving her the entire collection of Louis Vuitton bags and an expensive watch.
At the time she was untroubled by her friendship with the son of the "Mad Dog" of the Middle East. After all, Britain and France had made up their differences with him, and Libya was wide open for Western business. She was curious about his father, although she was never allowed to meet him. "You must become a Muslim first," Mutassim had told her.
Invitations to Tripoli followed, and she spent days in his beach house, his country estate and city villa, replete with gold fittings and huge chandeliers. The interior decorating was lavish but in awful taste, she said.
"Of course I knew that it was not right to spend so much money like that," she said. "I asked him many times about the welfare of the Libyan people, and he said the schools and hospitals were free, that rice and flour were cheap. It was hard for me to judge life in Libya for ordinary people - I was always staying in a gilded cage when I visited. They looked happy enough."
She did, though, see occasional flashes of temper from Mutassim. On one occasion a servant brought a meal that was cold. "He shouted at the guy and threw plates on the floor. He put that guy like a dog in a corner and then he demanded that he eat the whole lot, there in front of us. It was humiliating. I never saw the servant again, and I don't know what happened to him.
"Afterwards he must have apologised to me a million times for it. He said I was one of the few people who was a real friend and says what she feels. He said he didn't get that from many people."
The hedonist son also had ambitions for power, inspired by his father's example. "He worshipped his father," Miss van Zon said. "He talked a lot about Hitler, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez. He liked leaders who had a lot of power. He always said 'I want to do better than my father'."
He is once said to have tried to take power in a failed coup, and was exiled to Egypt for several years before being allowed to return. As a gesture of forgiveness, his father appointed him as national security director, although Miss van Zon still saw signs of his sibling rivalry with his elder brother Saif al-Islam, who seemed the favoured successor.
He also appeared to confirm Libya's role in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which the regime had long denied involvement, despite paying compensation to the families of the 270 victims.
"We had a big discussion about Lockerbie when he was in Amsterdam for a couple of days," Miss van Zon said. "I said the victims were civilians, not military, and he said, 'Talitha, the Americans attacked our house in Libya and my father lost one child [a reference to the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986].' He was quite open about the Libyans doing it for revenge."
Her penultimate visit to him was in February, just before the uprising, when she remembered him complaining about the "ungrateful people" in Libya's restive east. As the uprising unfolded, she found it hard to believe the accounts of civilians being killed by the regime - but when she talked to Mutassim on the phone, she heard a different man to the one she had known. He now used phrases such as "wipe them out" or "show them no mercy".
Then, at the end of August, she made what she called her "big mistake", returning to Libya. Assured by Mutassim that the regime was prevailing in its battle for survival, she was also hoping that he would help pay for treatment for her father, who has Alzheimer's Disease.
She only met him once, for a drink a week ago last Friday - the night before rebels attacked Tripoli. Mutassim seemed relaxed, comparing the Libyan uprising to the riots in London, and arguing that the police had to be tough. "He said the rebels were a bit crazy in the head," she recalled. "He said that in countries like Libya you have to do it a bit harder, otherwise they don't listen. There was no fear that the regime was going to lose. I think he was a little bit in denial."
One of the reasons for his upbeat mood may have been because his star had risen within the regime. Mutassim had directed some of Gaddafi's toughest units in battles around Benghazi and Misurata, and despite their questionable performance, was starting to be seen as Gaddafi's warrior son, the effective heir in waiting.
The day after her drink with Mutassim, Miss van Zon left in a convoy for Tunisia, but it was ambushed and she had to turn back. As gun battles raged in the city, his staff took her to a hotel, where she was put into the care of a Libyan female official. "As the battle was going on I spoke to the hotel staff and for perhaps the first time heard what Libyans really thought of Muammar Gaddafi. People said they hated him and that he had ruined their lives," Miss van Zon said.
When the rebels arrived at the hotel, she begged for help from the female official. Instead, the woman dragged her out of her room and paraded her before the fighters.
Miss van Zon did not understand what was being said in Arabic, but picked up the word "benzene" (petrol) several times and became convinced that they were going to burn her to death.
Alone, terrified, and by her own admission paranoid, she threw herself from a hotel balcony, breaking an arm and suffering back injuries. The hotel staff took her to hospital through streets where there was still fighting.
Now she is on her way home. Dutch tabloid newspaper reporters are waiting for her, excited at the prospect of a story about a Playboy centrefold, a Gaddafi son, and a misadventure in the middle of a gigantic battle.
"Coming to Libya in the middle of a war was the biggest mistake of my life," she said.
Mutassim's whereabouts are unknown; rebels are enthusiastically ransacking his luxurious homes.
He was last reported in the Bab al-Azizia compound, overrun last week by rebels. If he is still alive, he is perhaps preparing to die a martyr's death like his brother.
The Sunday Telegraph
