'They rammed it up my rectum'

2005-02-18 08:02

London - United States military forces in Afghanistan engaged in "widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse" of detainees, then sought to cover up their wrongdoing, a British newspaper alleged on Friday.

The Guardian said it had seen 1 000 pages of evidence from US army investigations in Afghanistan and in Iraq, which were released to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "after a long legal battle".

It said the evidence pointed to prisoner abuse at the main detention centre at Bagram, near Kabul, and at a smaller US installation near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

"Photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing US soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid 'another public outrage', the documents show," the newspaper said.

Sodomised

Abu Ghraib, a detention centre outside the Iraqi capital Baghdad, became notorious when photographs emerged last year depicting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their US captors.

In Iraq, The Guardian quoted from a statement by an Iraqi who was held in Tikrit, the home region of deposed president Saddam Hussein, northwest of the capital.

It said he claimed that a trio of US interrogators in civilian clothes dislocated his arms, put an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, choked him with a rope, and beat him with a baseball bat.

"A medical examination by a US military doctor confirmed the detainee's account," yet an investigation into the case was closed in October last year, the newspaper said.

"It is further proof that the army is not seriously investigating credible allegations of abuse," Jameel Jaffar, a lawyer for the ACLU, was quoted as saying.

Separately, The Guardian said that two former prisoners in Afghanistan - a Palestinian and a Jordanian - have made sworn affidavits after they were freed last year from detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

The Palestinian, Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, told human rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith that he was blindfolded, gagged, bound and sodomised by US soldiers at Bagram air base in 2002.

"They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum," Hussain said. "It was excruciatingly painful."

The Jordanian, Wesam Abdulrahman Ahmed Al Deemawi, detained for a year until March last year, said that during 40 days at Bagram, he was threatened with dogs, stripped and photographed "in shameful and obscene positions".

The Guardian said it asked for comment from the US military, but got no reply apart from an email from a spokesperson in Kabul who said he was looking into its questions.

- AFP