Posted on 05/11/2004 3:20:50 AM PDT by Qwinn
"The authorities also executed numerous inmates at Abu Ghraib, al-Makasib, and other prisons, including long term untried political detainees and convicted prisoners. Some were apparently tortured first. Relatives reported that the body of 'Abd al-Wahed al-Rifa'i, hanged in March after two years in detention without trial, bore marks of torture when they collected it on March 26 from the General Security Directorate in Baghdad. Thirteen Abu Ghraib detainees, including students, were executed in August, and twenty-one prisoners convicted by special courts of killing several security agents were executed in October, including Falah Ahmad Hussain, Muhsin Yassin Kadhim, and Baqer Jassim 'Ali."
"In November 2000, a former Iraqi intelligence officer who fled to Jordan in June 1999 disclosed the existence of a government "prison cleansing" campaign. Captain Khalid Sajed al-Janabi, an intelligence operative from 1979 to 1999, said a March 15, 1998 directive from the Office of the President had authorized the establishment of supervisory committees to "clean up Iraqi prisons" and that he had been appointed to the Abu Ghraib prison committee. The "cleansing" operations, he said, resulted in the execution of some 2,000 detainees and sentenced prisoners on one day, April 27, 1998. Al-Janabi also reported that at least fifty Kuwaitis detained by Iraq since the 1991 Gulf war were still being held at the General Investigative Bureau in Baghdad between April and July 1998. A doctor who worked at Abu Ghraib prison hospital before fleeing to Jordan in July also reported regular mass executions of prisoners. Maher Fakher Khashan said most of those executed were political detainees identified by serial number rather than by name, whose bodies were removed for burial in special vehicles, and that he had most recently witnessed thirty-four such executions on July 8. He reported too that prison authorities forced doctors to inject some detainees with poison and then issue death certificates attributing their deaths to natural causes."
(Excerpt) Read more at hrw.org ...
Qwinn
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