MOSCOW - A Ukrainian nurse who treated Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi dismissed rumors on Tuesday that he had a nurse as a mistress but said the man they call "Papa" gives his staff gold watches every year.

Speaking to Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, nurse Oksana Balinskaya denied a rumor in a WikiLeaks dispatch that Gadhafi had a "voluptuous blonde" nurse as a mistress, named by media as Galyna Kolotnytska.

Kolotnytska "had exactly the same duties as the other nurses - there are five of us - but was more experienced", working for Gadhafi for eight years and speaking Arabic, her colleague said.

She added that reports of a relationship were untrue. "What they are writing about Galyna Kolotnytska is made-up stories," said Balinskaya.

She posed wearing a watch decorated with a portrait of Gadhafi and said that the Libyan leader gave his staff Italian gold watches every year on the anniversary of his taking power.

"People who work for him six to eight years have a whole collection," she said.

Gadhafi was a generous boss, personally ordering that the nurses received an allowance when they visited New York so that they could go clothes shopping, she said, calling the leader "Papa".

Balinskaya said she decided to work as a nurse in Libya but did not know that she was going to work for Gadhafi until he greeted the new recruits.

The five nurses worked in a hospital in Gadhafi's compound, she said.

The Libyan leader is in good health, she added.

AFP

(China Daily 04/06/2011 page11)