t wasn’t until she saw her cousins, rights activists Salwa and Iman, leading a daring protest outside a courthouse in Benghazi that Hala Bugaighis realised something truly huge was happening.

It was February 2011. Hosni Mubarak had stepped down in neighbouring Egypt just the week before and that revolutionary fever had spilled over the borders into Libya’s second city.

Hala Bugaighis, then a 31-year-old commercial lawyer, was more than 1,000km west in Tripoli, a stronghold of Muammar Gaddafi who had ruled the country with an iron fist for more than 40 years.