- Dramatic corroboration of the massacre of Afghan prisoners
by the US-backed Northern Alliance at the start of the war in 2001 was
last night provided by American pathologists commissioned to investigate
the claims by the UN.
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- A vivid account of the slaughter was provided to The
Observer last week by three Britons who were released from the US detention
camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba more than two years after they were first
seized in Afghanistan. They told how they narrowly escaped the massacre
before being handed over to American forces and flown to Guantanamo Bay.
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- Forensic anthropologist William Haglund, who earlier
led inquiries into mass graves in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Sierra
Leone, told The Observer how he dug into an area of recently disturbed
desert soil outside the town of Shebargan, and exhumed 15 bodies, a tiny
sample, he said, of what may be a very large total.
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- Thanks to the cold and arid climate, they were well enough
preserved to carry out autopsies. Haglund's conclusion 'that they died
from suffocation' exactly corroborates the stories told by the Guantanamo
detainees in last week's Observer .
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- 'They are the first survivors to describe what we already
believed happened to the victims we discovered,' Haglund said yesterday.
'The time has come for a full investigation, under the protection of the
international community.'
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- Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed, from Tipton
in the West Midlands, told in their interviews how weeks before they were
handed over to the Americans, they were captured by Northern Alliance forces
led by General Abdurrashid Dostum in November 2001, as they tried to flee
war-torn Afghanistan.
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- At Shebargan, they were herded into two of several truck
containers. Then, Iqbal said, the doors were sealed. He and the others
lost consciousness, and when he came to he was 'lying on top of dead bodies,
breathing the stench of their blood and urine'.
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- 'We lived because someone made holes with a machine gun,
though they were shooting low, and still more died from the bullets. When
we got out, about 20 in each container were still alive.'
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- Haglund visited the mass grave at Shebargan twice in
2002, in the wake of the coalition's war against the Taliban. On the first
occasion, he was part of a team from the US-based Physicians for Human
Rights, which identified dozens of mass graves in northern Afghanistan,
many containing the remains of prisoners killed by the proxy warlord forces
backed by Britain and America.
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- The team also inspected the Northern Alliance prison
at Shebargan in January, 2002, while the 'Tipton Three' were still there.
Their findings, said John Heffernan, another team member, also corroborate
the Tipton men's story. 'There were nearly 3,000 of them being held in
squalid conditions under the control of Dostum, whose palatial headquarters
were across the street,' Heffernan said.
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- Iqbal and Rasul told how they had been marched through
the desert towards Shebargan past huge ditches already filled with bodies.
Heffernan said: 'After taking into account the thousands crowded into the
dilapidated prison, the whereabouts of many taken captive remained unknown.
We began to suspect some might have met their fate on the way there. After
we left the prison and travelled down the road a few miles into the desert,
we smelled the unmistakable odour of decaying flesh and soon found bulldozer
tracks and skeletal remains.' Haglund came back under United Nations auspices
a few months later.
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- By chance, on the day he arrived at Shebargan, Dostum
had gone into the mountains, he said, leaving behind a military escort
which allowed him to open the grave. 'I uncovered one small corner, exposing
15 remains which were quite complete, and did autopsies on three. There
were no signs of trauma and these were all young men. This is consistent
with death by asphyxiation.
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- 'I told Dostum's security chief that they had died from
suffocation, and there was this big silence hanging over the desert.'
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- The details about elements of the Tipton Three's story
assumed a new importance last week, after the Sun published claims by a
US Embassy spokesman, Lee McClenny, that the three had trained at an al-Qaeda
camp in 2000. They told The Observer last week that they had all confessed
to this accusation only after months of solitary confinement and 200 separate
interrogation sessions, only to have it finally disproved by MI5, which
brought documents showing they had been in Britain at the time.
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- After making his claims in the Sun, McClenny refused
to answer further questions from journalists, while Lt Col Leon Sumpter,
the US spokesman at Guantanamo Bay, said any allegations concerning detainees
were highly classified, even after their release: 'I don't know how the
Embassy got this,' he said. 'It didn't come from us, and we knew nothing
about it.' McClenny's letter was widely criticised as an attempt to nullify
the Tipton men's stories of abuse at American hands.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1174653,00.html
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