Colonel Muammar Gaddafi invited hundreds of attractive Italian "hostesses" to a villa in Rome last night for an evening at which he urged them to convert to Islam and told them Christianity was based on a fraud, Italian reports said today.

The Libyan leader is in Italy to attend a United Nations summit on world food security. Reports said that Colonel Gaddafi's aides phoned an agency which provides elegantly dressed young women to act as hospitality staff at events.

The agency was asked to send 500 women to the residence of Hafed Gaddur, the Libyan ambassador in Rome, where Colonel Gaddafi is staying, over a series of evenings during the three day summit.

The agency advertised for "500 pleasing girls between 18 and 35 years of age, at least one metre 70 high." The women were asked to dress elegantly but soberly, with both miniskirts and cleavage-revealing decolletage firmly banned.

Those who replied were offered €60 (£53) to attend an evening at the villa for an "exchange of opinions" and to "receive a Libyan gift", which turned out to be a copy of the Koran. They were given nothing to eat or drink, however.

Paola Lo Mele, a journalist with the Italian news agency ANSA who posed as a hostess to enter the villa, said the 200 women who attended yesterday had to pass through metal detectors, before being ushered by white turbanned Libyan staff into a "sumptuous drawing room" with white and red divans arranged in a semi-circle in front of Colonel Gaddafi. He arrived an hour late. He sat next to an interpreter and two of his renowned female guards.

The Libyan leader said it was "untrue that Islam is against women" according to Corriere della Sera. He urged the women to convert to Islam, pointing out that whereas there were four different Gospels, there was only one Koran.

He then observed — to "general incredulity" — that Christ had not died on the Cross and been resurrected, as Christians believe, because the person crucified had been "a look-alike" who was substituted for the real Jesus.

"Convert to Islam. Jesus was sent to the Jews, not for you. Mohammed, on the other hand, was sent for all human beings," he reportedly said. "Whoever goes in a different direction than Mohammed is wrong. God's religion is Islam, and whoever follows a different one, in the end, will lose," Colonel Gaddafi added, according to La Stampa.

He said women must do only "what their physical condition allows them", and spoke about the role that women played during the Second World War. He claimed that in the West women "have often been used as pieces of furniture, changed whenever it pleases men. And this is an injustice." He then invited the women to travel to the Islamic holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

As the soiree broke up at midnight he handed out copies of the Koran, his own Green Book on the Libyan revolution, and a pamphlet entitled How to be a Muslim.

Colonel Gaddafi, noted for his eccentric behaviour, aroused hackles in Italy in June when he arived for celebrations marking an historic Italian-Libyan reconciliation accord with a photograph pinned to his chest of a Libyan national hero executed by Italian Fascist troops during Italy's occupation of Libya.

The food summit was inaugurated at the Rome headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) this morning by Pope Benedict XVI. It is attended by the leaders of 100 countries including Colonel Gaddafi, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Mr Mugabe arrived in Rome at the weekend with an entourage of sixty and his wife Grace. Because of his human rights record Mr Mugabe has been barred from travelling to the European Union since 2002, but is allowed to attend United Nations meetings. He has twice used this loophole to attend FAO food summits in Rome.

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