By Moutaz Ali.
Tripoli, 14 September 2016:
Libya’s oldest woman has died allegedly at the age of 122 at her home in Shakashuk in the Nafusa Mountains.
Um-Almair Ahmed Ben-Omar Laswad was born in 1894, according to her grandson, the journalist Mohamed Sultan. He added she had never taken any medicine and, to the end, did not lose her memory.
Sultan told the Libya Herald that his grandmother had spent the first 70 years of her life living in a simple house made of goat skin.
She gave birth to seven sons and five daughters. When she died she had a total of 247 descendants. Sultan’s own mother was one of the five daughters. Laswad gave birth to her in 1951 when she was 57, he said.
Sultan added that his grandmother stuck with simple local foods, made from barley or wheat with olive oil.
The oldest living woman recorded in the Guinness Book of Records is 115 but the publication’s compilers generally rely on people submitting information to them. This was not done in the case of Laswad.
