Home > More Iraqis allege abuse by U.S. military
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq, May 4 (Reuters) - With six U.S. soldiers reprimanded
and six others facing criminal charges, Iraq’s prisoner-abuse scandal
looked far from over on 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.
U.S. President George W. Bush told his defence 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 centre 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 sodomise
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 75 km (50 miles) north of
Baghdad.