Ahmed plunged himself into the uprising around Ras Lanuf. His father, Mohammed, fears he has been tortured and killed
Mohammed Ahmed Boulika feared the worst, and it was not that his son had been shot dead in the heat of Libya's revolution.
Dressed in a black robe, with a pistol on his hip, Boulika walked the streets of the frontline town of Ras Lanuf with a picture of his son, more passport than rebel fighter, hanging around his neck alongside a sign: "I'm asking about my missing son, Ahmed Mohammed.
"I see the bodies of the rebels. The things they've done to them is the way you wouldn't treat an animal. They cut their ears, their lips, they pull out their nails, their beards. I can see they do this before they kill them," he said. "I clean the corpses at the hospital. I see things like this, strange things. If Ahmed Mohammed is dead I hope it is not this way."
Boulika, 56, and his son abandoned their jobs as lorry drivers to join the flood of rebel volunteers who grabbed a gun and tore off to the front at the beginning of Libya's revolution, imagining that the sheer weight of the uprising would roll over Gaddafi's forces and into Tripoli.
For several days their advance seemed unstoppable but the Libyan dictator soon regained his footing and Boulika and his son were among those who discovered that they would be required to fire their Kalashnikovs in anger if the revolution was to be saved. He admits he was not up for that kind of fight.
"We were here together when Gaddafi attacked Ras Lanuf. I went back. At my age and my health I can't go fighting the way the battles are raging back and forward," he said. "My son went forward and joined the fighters at the front. I tried to tell him to come with me. My son said he didn't come here to retreat but to fight. He disappeared."
Boulika has four sons in the fight but 28-year-old Ahmed Mohammed, married with an 18-month-old child and another on the way, was the only one who stayed with the frontline rebels. Three other sons joined the day trippers to what might be regarded as a drive-in war in which volunteer rebels turn out as they feel like it – usually for the celebratory advances – and fire their weapons more in shows of bravado than real combat.
Boulika says Ahmed Mohammed was different, more determined to die for the revolution "if that's what God wills".
Now he is missing – and he is not the only one. The Libyan Red Crescent has documented 370 people as missing since the counter-offensive began, most of them volunteer fighters with little or no military experience but also medics treating the injured. Some are presumed dead. Others have been seen taken alive by the Gaddafi forces. Their whereabouts are not known.
Among them are at least four missing doctors, including a neurosurgeon and the head of radiology at a Benghazi hospital. According to Human Rights Watch two of the doctors disappeared a fortnight ago after they set out in an ambulance with a driver and a nurse to collect the wounded and dead on the road between Benghazi and Ajdabiya. Another ambulance driver last saw them lying on the road bound hand and foot in the custody of government soldiers. The nurse was dead.
HRW has documented more than a dozen cases in which the relatives of missing fighters have called their mobile phones only to have them answered by men who identified themselves as military officials in Tripoli. It said that one of the anonymous voices told a relative who enquired about the welfare of a missing rebel: "Your son is in detention in Tripoli. You can come and pick up the body."
Other missing people have appeared on state television in Tripoli falsely confessing to belonging to al-Qaida.
Boulika's hope that Ahmed Mohammed is alive has been kept afloat by the fact that his body was not found after the rebels retook Ras Lanuf at the weekend. The corpses of the dead fighters were brought to the local hospital to be washed before burial.
Boulika, having returned to the town to look for his son, volunteered to undertake the ritual washing while checking to see if his son was among the dead. That is when he saw that not all had died swiftly.
"It was a big shock. You do not expect to see that. It was horrible. God willing my son was only arrested and not tortured. I hope they did something humane with him. Perhaps he is a prisoner," he said.
Boulika says that if Ahmed Mohammed is dead then it is a price worth paying for his country's freedom.
"The nation is worth more than a son or a brother or anything else. If there were 100 sons who pass through the gates it's worth it in the name of the nation and religion," he said.
But Boulika's sad voice and demeanour betrays doubt about that statement, as if that is what he is expected to say. He is silent for a moment before he extends the thought. "I want freedom, I want dignity, I want happiness. I won't accept oppression any more. But I want my son."
His hunt for Ahmed Mohammed would have to wait. By dusk none of the strangers who stopped Boulika to speak about his son had any information. At the hospital a doctor spoke of his own son who was missing for days but is now confirmed dead. Another man said he had two sons fighting and that each day was a mix of pride and fear.
As the sun went down the sound of government artillery was drawing close to Ras Lanuf and another mass exodus of rebel fighters began a hurried flight east, along with the few civilians who had returned home. Boulika was forced to leave with them, the picture of Ahmed Mohammed still hanging around his neck. By dawn the city had fallen once more to government forces.