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BENGHAZI, Libya — On February 20th, a mild-mannered, bespectacled, diabetic oil company bureaucrat with an interest in diving and spearfishing sacrificed himself in an act that had arguably the greatest single impact on the Libyan revolution. Its reverberations also suggest the double-edged nature of suicide attacks, which have been almost nonexistent on the rebel side.

Neighbors later reported that they had seen Mahdi Ziu, 49, with cans of cooking fuel in the morning. In the mid-afternoon, filled with anguish at the impotence of the unarmed revolutionaries in the face of Qaddafi’s troops, he filled his family sedan with the fuel and drove it into the well-defended gate of Qaddafi’s main Benghazi arsenal, known as the kiteeba, or brigade headquarters. The resulting explosion—accidentally captured on a grainy mobile phone video made by one of many Libyans standing a couple of hundred yards away—tore a hole in the perimeter wall. This enabled the hitherto unarmed rebels to storm the fort and capture the weapons used in the early phase of the revolt. It also tore a hole in the heart of Mahdi’s best friend, 55-year-old businessman Abdo Farhoud.

“We were a group of four friends,” he explained in careful English. “Mahdi was the youngest and I am the oldest. We knew we could do nothing about Qaddafi. So we used to go diving every weekend, to take our families away from this bad situation [i.e., the revolution]. Mahdi used to prepare the food and tents for our trips.” Farhoud, bald and bespectacled, was sitting in the lobby of Benghazi’s Tibesty Hotel, the city’s five star and gathering spot of politicos and businessmen.

By Farhoud’s account, nothing in Mahdi’s prior life suggested that he would become a martyr to the revolution. If anything, Mahdi enjoyed life and had a good sense of humor. But when fighting broke out in Benghazi on February 17th, the oil company he worked for shut down and he had free time. “He started to follow the political situation very closely. He did not stop phoning me, he was very angry, shouting that they were killing our people. I was telling him, take care of yourself, you have two daughters.”

On the afternoon of the 20th, Farhoud spoke with his friend, then couldn’t reach him again after many attempts. “Around two p.m. his phone was off. Around four to four-thirty, this happened and I heard someone went through the gate of the kiteeba. But I had no idea it was Mahdi.

“When we did not hear from him, our group of friends went looking for Mahdi—he had diabetes so we thought he might have had a problem. Each of us went to a different hospital. I went to his flat, but I knew he had taken his wife and daughters away from this area [because it was near the fighting]. One of his neighbors said he saw him putting many containers of fuel in his car and thought he might be making Molotov cocktails. On the 20th, we did not find him. The lights were off in the city and there were a lot of fires burning in the kiteeba.

“On the 21st, we found his car in front of the kiteeba completely burned. I had heard that the car used in the attack was his type of car. Something told me to look inside the car and I found a small piece of bone, from the head. I still did not believe it was his. So I looked for him inside the fort.”

Farhoud opened photo files on his bulky laptop. They showed him and his pals with the fruits of their spearfishing trip: a four-foot-long fish. And then there was a grimmer group: Mahdi’s burnt out car, which Farhoud is saving for future commemoration, a video taken at the hospital where Farhoud brought the bagful of bone fragments that were the only remains in Mahdi’s car, and finally, Farhoud carring a white-shrouded package about a foot long—the remains prepared for Islamic burial.

“He had two daughters. And you know in Libya, two children are not enough, but Mahdi’s wife could not have more. He loved his daughters very much. After his death, one of them said to me, ‘Before this, I didn’t know he loved anything more than us.’”

Farhoud began crying. “Since his death, I cry every day.” He paused and regained some of his calm. “And now I have asked permission from my mother to go to fight. You may not believe this, but I have nine sisters, I am the only son, so I am the head of the family and responsible for them. My mother is an old lady and she and two of my sisters who are not married live with me. If this war is not over by the end of Ramadan, I will go to fight.”

At 55, with these responsibilities and his own three sons and daughter, Farhoud would seem a less than logical candidate for the front lines. But suicide attacks appear to be viral. Farhoud seems in danger of having been infected by his friend’s act. Luckily the Libyan revolution has had few such attacks. Though they are a powerful weapon of insurgents, they have spillover effects that are socially destructive. Ironically, though Mahdi’s act was very useful to the anti-Qaddafi cause, it was also in the tradition of similar totalitarian regimes that urge the individual to lose himself, if not his life, in an ideological struggle.

Libya under Qaddafi was a place where the individual pursuit of happiness had no value. Today, Libyans often comment on how depressed they were for decades. Chain-smoking is much more common than any form of exercise, and although alcohol is illegal (and I’ve never seen any here) there is apparently an underground culture of alcoholism. The four friends’ spearfishing trips were an act of resistance to the grim Qaddafi regime, though not one that changed anything after the weekend was over. Mahdi Ziu didn’t leave a note, but he seems to have been a life-loving man who died in part so that his fellow Libyans would be free to pursue happiness. Hopefully, Farhoud will decide to honor his friend’s sacrifice in a way that does not court death.