Baghdad, Iraq – Sunni Arab leaders and an alleged torture victim gave accounts Wednesday of bloody beatings, starvation and killings in a secret underground prison run by Iraq’s Shiite-led Interior Ministry and uncovered by U.S. soldiers.
“Within seconds, I was swimming in the air,” said a 20-year- old law student, who asserted in an interview that his captors yanked him to the ceiling by a metal chain looped through cuffs that bound his hands behind his back.
That abuse, he said, began the first torture session in what would be 37 days of confinement.
In later sessions, he was placed in a barrel of cold water and simultaneously shocked with electrical current, he said at a Sunni political party headquarters, where he spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by his former captors.
Three days after U.S. troops entered the illicit prison, and a day after Iraq’s Shiite-led government acknowledged the detentions, allegations of torture and long-term detention at the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad’s middle-class Jadriyah neighborhood have become the most prominent of numerous accusations of abuse leveled against the country’s Shiite-dominated security forces.
Leaders of Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority said Wednesday that beatings at the prison had broken prisoners’ bones.
“Abu Ghraib prison is now considered as heaven compared to Iraqi detention facilities,” said Abdul Salam Kubaisi, a senior official of the Association of Muslim Scholars, referring to the U.S.-run prison outside Baghdad where guards abused Iraqi detainees.
Several members of the association, a Sunni religious group that includes many hard-line opponents of the U.S.-backed government, were taken to the Interior Ministry prison, Kubaisi said, and at least one disappeared there.
The Interior Ministry compound, which has been the target of repeated car bombings and is surrounded by concrete barricades, is in the heart of Jadriyah. Nearby are offices that house the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite religious party that is the strongest in Iraq’s government.
Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division entered the compound Sunday night after an Iraqi army commander relayed a report from a Sunni family that it believed its 14- or 15-year-old son had disappeared inside.
