More prison abuse in Iraq

2004-06-25 14:17

Baghdad - A US soldier has told how a senior military intelligence commander at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison was present when a detainee died during questioning.

Speaking as a witness at a two-day preliminary hearing at a military court in Baghdad for a female soldier embroiled in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, Captain Donald Reese said a "Colonel Pappas" was one of a number of people present during the interrogation.

Colonel Thomas Pappas was commander of the 205 Military Intelligence Brigade at the prison near Baghdad. He is now deployed in Germany, a US military spokesperson said.

On the first day of the hearing for Specialist Sabrina Harman, 26 - which is due to conclude on Friday - Reese described how he saw the bleeding body of a prisoner who was brought in alive after a bomb attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Iraqi capital on October 27.

Harman, who faces a range of charges including desecrating a corpse and mistreating prisoners, was photographed grinning next to the body of the prisoner in one of the images of the scandal that shocked the world in April.

Dead in shower

"I was told that when he was brought in he was combative, that they took him up to the room and during the interrogation he passed," Reese said during his testimony on Thursday, adding that the first time he saw the man was when he was dead in a shower.

Reese said he had at first been told that the man died of a heart attack.

The body "was bleeding from the head, nose, mouth," he said.

"I heard Colonel Pappas say: 'I'm not going to go down alone for this'," Reese told the hearing.

The body was left locked in the shower overnight to avoid frightening other prisoners and an autopsy was conducted the following day, the captain said.

It established the cause of death as a blood clot from trauma, he added.

Twelve Iraqis were killed in the October car-bombing of the ICRC's Baghdad headquarters.

The hearing was due to continue on Friday.

- AFP