- TEL AVIV (Reuters)
- A former Lebanese militia chief has told a court he was forcibly sodomised
on the order of an Israeli secret service interrogator who then left him
shackled and soaking in excrement for almost two weeks.
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- Too ashamed to repeat the order allegedly given by an
intelligence major codenamed "George", Mustafa Dirani spelled
it out to the Tel Aviv court hearing his civil suit for 6 million shekels
in damages for the 1994 interrogation.
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- Dirani was summoned at short notice to testify because
he is to be repatriated in a prisoner swap on Thursday between Israel and
Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah. The state said he had concocted the
charges.
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- Israeli commandos abducted Dirani in 1994 in the hope
of trading him for information on missing air force navigator Ron Arad.
Dirani's Amal militia captured Arad in 1986. Dirani told interrogators
he had handed the airman to Iran, but on Tuesday he said this confession
was false and forced out of him.
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- Dirani accused George of ordering a soldier to sodomise
him within days of his capture, and described another incident in which
he said a police baton was inserted into his rectum.
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- "The pain was indescribable," said the bearded
and bespectacled Dirani, 52, who needed a walking stick to take the stand.
"I screamed out to God and then he took it out."
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- Prosecutor Shammai Becker dismissed the charges as having
"no basis whatsoever". He accused Dirani of trying to justify
to his countrymen information he divulged in Israel. "The interrogators
didn't touch a hair on his beard," Becker said.
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- According to security sources, George was suspended after
Dirani filed a complaint through his lawyer. A picture of George presented
to court showed a broad-shouldered man lounging in a stripped sweater.
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- URINE AND FAECES
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- His Arabic testimony translated into Hebrew, Dirani quoted
George's threats before the alleged rape, but stopped short of profanity.
"They said they were going to S-C-R-E-W me," he said, adding:
"In our community we don't use such words."
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- Dirani said he spent most of the next two weeks shackled
and wearing adult diapers that left him soaked in urine and faeces.
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- "They wanted to know how they transferred Ron Arad
by car, but I did not see. I wasn't there. They wanted details I did not
have," Dirani said, insisting that he had only confessed to involvement
in the airman's handover to Iran under torture.
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- Dirani, who said he oversaw interrogations as Amal security
chief, told the court Arad spent the first night in captivity at his home
and that he did not know what became of him thereafter.
-
- Yet under cross-examination Dirani said that when he
broke away from Amal with other militiamen two years later, they took Arad
with them. He did not give further details.
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- In Thursday's exchange, Israel is to free 436 prisoners,
most of them Palestinians, in return for an Israeli businessman held by
Hizbollah and three Israeli soldiers, now presumed dead.
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- Israel denies its security services use torture. In 1996
the Supreme Court allowed "moderate physical pressure" -- including
sleep deprivation and violent shaking of a subject -- in urgent counterterrorism
cases, a ruling decried by human rights groups.
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- Security sources said Dirani was interrogated in Facility
1391, a secret prison reserved for top-priority foreign captives. The Supreme
Court is expected next month to consider an Israeli rights group's appeal
to shut down Facility 1391.
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