- ABU GHRAIB, Iraq (Reuters)
- With six U.S. soldiers reprimanded and six others facing criminal charges,
Iraq's prisoner-abuse scandal looked far from over Tuesday as more Iraqis
came forward to allege maltreatment by U.S. troops.
-
- "If the Americans ever come back to detain me I
will commit suicide before I am taken to this place again," Sha'aban
al-Janabi, a former prisoner, said as he pointed at the notorious Abu Ghraib
jail on the outskirts of Baghdad.
-
- Janabi, seized last December near Falluja and accused
of participating in attacks on U.S. forces, says he was beaten frequently
during the 25 days he spent inside Abu Ghraib before being set free in
farmland on the outskirts of Falluja.
-
- "I was blindfolded and handcuffed, we were dumped
outside on a gravel yard for 10 days, we were given one bottle of water
all day for cleaning and drinking," he said on returning to the jail
to look for relatives who were arrested with him but are still being held.
-
- On the flat scrubland outside Abu Ghraib, where tens
of thousands of people are believed to have been tortured and put to death
under Saddam Hussein, dozens of men and women now gather each day hoping
for news of relatives seized by America.
-
- Reports of alleged prisoner abuse inside, first broadcast
on U.S. television and later around the world, have reached them too, as
have pictures of naked men piled on each other in front of laughing captors
and of a hooded man with wires attached.
-
- President Bush told his defense secretary on Monday to
take "strong actions" against those responsible and find out
if the problem was more widespread.
-
- OTHER PRISONS WORSE, IRAQIS SAY
-
- Some Iraqis say Abu Ghraib is something of a sanctuary
compared with what happens in other U.S.-run prisons around the country.
-
- Abdullah al-Dulaimi, who was standing outside Abu Ghraib
trying to get information about two brothers detained there, said he had
been held in a detention center near the border with Syria for a month
in January.
-
- He says he was once put in something called the "coffin,"
a wooden box too short to stand up in, for two days. He says he was also
frequently beaten and had electrical wires attached to his penis.
-
- "We were beaten, deprived of sleep and humiliated,"
he said.
-
- "If you ever talked to the prisoner next to you,
you would have to do push-ups with a soldier standing on your back. They
made us stand naked and then a soldier would come beat us with a stick
and sometimes sodomize us with the stick," he said.
-
- Talking of his brothers inside Abu Ghraib, he added:
-
- "It's good they are detained here, this palace is
the prison of mercy compared to the place I was detained in."
-
- None of the claims by former prisoners could be verified.
-
- The U.S. military said it could not rule out opening
further investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq in the future if credible
claims by former and current prisoners were raised.
-
- "At the moment we have six officers who've been
reprimanded and six more who face a court-martial and we're going to get
to the bottom of those investigations," said Lieutenant-Colonel Dan
Williams, a U.S. army spokesman in Baghdad.
-
- "But it's not a closed book by any means. If further
investigations are needed, they will happen."
-
- Despite such assurances, relatives at Abu Ghraib remained
concerned for family members being held inside, fearing that some of the
same abuses might have been carried out on them.
-
- "They arrested my son six months ago. I have been
coming here almost every day and I haven't see him yet," said Jasim
Khalaf Abid, a farmer in his sixties from the town of Balad, about 50 miles
north of Baghdad.
-
- Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited
without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable
for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance
thereon.
|
