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Freed prisoners recount abuses
09/05/2004 21:20 - (SA)
Washington - Men who said they were released from the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad recounted even more graphic details about the abuses they suffered, after recognizing themselves in photos published around the world, Time magazine reported on Sunday.
Haider Sabbar Abed al-Abbadi said he and six other prisoners believed they were being punished for a small scuffle when they were taken into a room and had their clothes cut off. He told the magazine he was the hooded man shown naked with an American woman soldier pointing at his genitals.
He said he was also photographed in a pile-up of naked men lying on top of other prisoners, with smiling US soldiers watching. In another picture, he said he was shown with a second naked inmate kneeling before him.
"I felt a mouth closing around my penis. It was only when they took the bag off my head that I saw it was my friend," he said. Al-Abbadi said he could see cameras flashing through the hood.
After nine months in US custody, he said he was not charged and never even interrogated. Man kept in shipping container
Nabil Shakar Abdul Razaq al-Taiee, 54, told Time that he saw US soldiers beating prisoners as recently as March. One of the beaten prisoners was a mentally unstable man kept in a shipping container for days.
Another man, Mohammed Unis Hassan, said he was arrested for looting a bank in July, and was held for seven months. He said he regularly saw a guard having sex with a female inmate on the floor across the hall from his cell.
Mohammed said he was beaten for hiding cigarettes, and once was cuffed to the bars of his cell and poked in the eye so hard that for three months he had blurred vision.
Another former prisoner said that on three occasions, he was hung from a large hook with his feet bound and his arms tied behind his back.
"They would take a stick and put it through the rope and pull me off the ground," Waleed Sabih al-Delami told the magazine.
The Time report came out as The New Yorker magazine published a new Iraq prison abuse photo showing a naked prisoner cowering under threat from two US military dogs, amid a ballooning political controversy and calls for the resignation of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
- AFP
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