New claims of US Qu'ran abuse

2005-05-26 07:53

Washington - Terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison told United States interrogators as early as April 2002, just three months after the first detainees arrived, that military guards abused them and desecrated the Qu?ran, declassified FBI records say.

"Their behaviour is bad," one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent on July 22 2002. "About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Qu'ran in the toilet."

Lawrence Di Rita, chief spokesperson for Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld, said on Wednesday that US military officials at Guantanamo Bay had recently found a separate record of the same allegation by the same detainee, and he was re-interviewed on May 14. "He did not corroborate his own allegation," Di Rita said.

The statements about guards disrespecting the Qu'ran echo public allegations made many months later by some detainees and their lawyers after the prisoners' release from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The once-secret FBI documents show a consistency to the allegations and are the first indication that Justice and Defence department officials were aware in early 2002 that detainees were accusing their guards of mistreating the Qu'ran.

'Gulag of our time'

Separately on Wednesday, Amnesty International urged the United States to shut down the prison, calling it "the gulag of our time." White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said that the human rights group's complaints were "unsupported by the facts" and that allegations of mistreatment were being investigated.

About 540 men are being held at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban government or the al-Qaeda terror network. Some have been jailed for more than three years without charge. The Defence Department argues that the detention prevents these enemy combatants from fighting against the United States.

Di Rita also said that the terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay had been trained to make such false claims.

Another detainee stated that he had been beaten unconscious at Guantanamo Bay in the spring of 2002, a period in which US interrogators were pressing hard for intelligence information they believed some of the detainees held on the planning, structure and tactics of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network.

The newly released FBI records do not indicate whether the allegations were investigated or substantiated.

In response to a recent Newsweek story, later retracted, that US officials had confirmed allegations of Qu'ran desecration at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that they have turned up no credible, substantiated claims that US military guards had deliberately treated the Muslim holy book with disrespect. The Newsweek story sparked protests by Muslims in different countries, including Afghanistan where at least 15 people died.

- AP