State denial adds insult to torture victims’ injuries

“There are dozens of people I know it happened to because it happened to me,” he said. Abu Ali was snatched during a raid in his Shia neighbourhood in mid-September and held for six weeks in a similar secret facility, where he and 20 other detainees were subjected to repeated torture.

Such violence, he insisted, was nothing unusual in the prison at a complex in central Baghdad known as the “security school” during the Saddam Hussein era.

“We were all tortured very badly,” he said. “I was handcuffed with my hands behind my back and then hanged from a hook in the ceiling. Then they tied a rope to my legs and pulled until I lost consciousness or my limbs were dislocated. Sometimes they electrocuted us by putting wires on our testicles. And then, of course, every day they would beat us.”

As Abu Ali recounted his story yesterday, Bayn Jabr, the Interior Minister and the senior official at the centre of the scandal, angrily denied on Iraqi television the allegations of systematic torture. He said that only five or six of 173 detainees had been badly harmed and they were among the country’s most dangerous terrorists.

Other officials have been more forthcoming about the extent of the abuse. Ali Kalib Khadher, the Deputy Minister for Police Affairs, blamed the “heritage of violence” left over from Saddam’s three decades in power. He added, however: “There has been much exaggeration about this issue. No one was beheaded, no one was killed.”

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1876952,00.html