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Iraqi detainees allege torture in US-run jails

BAGHDAD: Torture, abuse and humiliation of prisoners is widespread in US-run detention centres in Iraq, and not limited to a few cases, non-governmental organisations in Iraq and an American Christian group said on Sunday.

“We are here to tell the world that the cases of torture of Iraqi prisoners are not isolated incidents and they are not limited to Abu Ghraib prison, nor to the six US MPs,” a spokeswoman for the Iraqi Human Rights Organization (IHRO) told a news conference in Baghdad. Seven US Military Police (MPs) have been charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners after a global scandal erupted with the publication of photographs of naked detainees being humiliated at Abu Ghraib prison just outside Baghdad.

US spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said Specialist Jeremy Sivits would face a court martial in Baghdad next week, accused of abusing detainees.

US President George W. Bush has said the acts were “the wrongdoing of a few” and did not reflect the character of the 200,000 military personnel who have served in Iraq.

But rights groups disputed those assertions. “These are part of a systematic method of torture and inhuman treatment,” the IHRO spokeswoman said. People who said they had been victims of torture and relatives of detainees told the news conference of their degrading treatment in the US prisons. None of the accounts could be verified independently and there was no immediate comment on these specific cases from the US military. However, Kimmitt told a separate news conference all allegations would be investigated.

“The primary objective is to point out that there are systematic abuses taking place in the American prisons,” said Stewart Vriesinga of the Christian Peacemakers Team.

“Iraqis are treated in a dehumanised way.”

Issam al-Hammad said the Americans came to his village near al-Qaim on the Syrian border looking for his father, Abid Hammad al-Mahoosh, a major general in the disbanded Iraqi army. He wasn’t there, so they took Issam and his three brothers, the youngest of them age 16. “We spent five and a half months in four detention centres,” Issam al-Hammad said. Al-Hammad, who is in his late 20s, said they were beaten and given electrical shocks. “I was naked apart from my underpants and they poured water on my back and then electrified me with an electrical stick,” he said.

Several times American officers pointed a pistol at one of the brothers to force the others to talk, he said. “They told me if you don’t talk we will bring your mothers and sisters here,” al-Hammad said. The al-Hammad brothers showed a photograph of a body marked extensively with bruises and burns, which they said was their father, who surrendered to US forces after his sons were detained. —Reuters

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