Guantanamo: Sex torture claims

2005-10-20 15:07

Dubai - Startling new allegations have emerged of the sexual humiliation, beating and torture of a Bahraini detainee by United States interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, the Bahraini newspaper Gulf Daily News reported on Thursday.

Juma Mohammed al-Dossary claims he was stripped naked, then humiliated by a female interrogator, who squatted nude over him and smeared him with her menstrual blood, the paper said.

He alleges that on a later occasion he was forced to watch a naked man and woman having sex and was then offered sex with the woman if he co-operated during questioning.

Allegations that al-Dossary was brutally beaten and stamped on by up to eight guards, have already been widely reported.

Now he wakes up screaming from nightmares, suffers heart problems and fears he has been driven to mental illness, but trusts noone to treat him, the newspaper reported.

The new claims emerged in interview notes taken by lawyers representing six Bahraini detainees, held without trial for more than three years at Guantanamo Bay.

The notes have just been released after being "declassified" by the US authorities, lead lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan said as quoted by the paper.

Conditions have deteriorated this year, according to the notes, released following a visit to the camp last Sunday by Colangelo-Bryan and his team, the report said.

From March or early April this year guards began restricting al-Dossary to one shower every five or six days instead of every three days, and his health is also declining, the report said.

Colangelo-Bryan, who has just returned to the US after visiting all six Bahraini detainees, says they fear that they will stay in Guantanamo for the rest of their lives because the Bahraini government "does not care".

Bahrain says talks with US authorities over bringing home the six are progressing. - Sapa-dpa

- SAPA