BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s security services have locked up more than 1,000 members of other political parties over the past several months, detaining many of them in secret locations with no access to legal counsel and using “brutal torture” to extract confessions, his chief political rival has charged.
Ayad Allawi, the secular Shiite Muslim leader of the mainly Sunni Muslim Iraqiya bloc in parliament, who served as prime minister of the first Iraqi government after the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein, has laid out his allegations in written submissions to Iraq’s supreme judicial council. Allawi, whose bloc is part of al-Maliki’s coalition government, demanded Wednesday that the prime minister grant the detainees legal counsel and due process.
Some of the confessions obtained under duress were intended to implicate Allawi in a supposed plot to foment violent unrest across the country, Allawi charged in a formal complaint to President Jalal Talabani this month.
“Information has reached us that is beyond doubt regarding the brutal torture of our detainees in an attempt to extract false confessions from them, confessions referring to the general secretary himself,” Allawi wrote Talabani. “They are being made to confess that he has ordered armed demonstrators onto the streets to carry out violence.”
In a recent interview in Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, Allawi said Iraqiya leaders knew “from our own sources that they are being tortured in prisons and detention camps — one of them had his legs broken — and they’ve been denied access to their families, access to their lawyers.”
He said that 42 members of his political party, the Iraqi National Accord, had been detained: “Their wives, brothers and sisters have been flooding our offices. They want to know what has happened to their relatives, why they have been arrested, and they don’t know where they are.”
The wave of arrests of al-Maliki political opponents began in October, around the time it was becoming clear that talks on a continued U.S. presence in Iraq would fail.
The arrests targeted 600 supposed sympathizers of Hussein’s Baath party. But they continued through the end of the year, expanding to members of other political groups.
Al-Maliki’s official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, didn’t respond to an e-mailed request for comment. His telephones went unanswered.
Western diplomats scoff at the idea that the arrests were aimed at thwarting a coup.
“This is just paranoia,” said one diplomat, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “It’s fantasy land.”
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Sunnis suspected in deaths of four•BAGHDAD — Gunmen killed two Iraqi soldiers and two police officers in a series of shootings Saturday, officials said, in the latest attacks amid an escalating political crisis.
Suspected Sunni insurgents have frequently targeted Iraqi security forces to undermine public confidence in the Shiite-dominated government and its efforts to protect people. But the country is in the grips of a political crisis pitting the government against the largest Sunni-backed bloc, which has fueled fears that an ongoing spike in violence targeting primarily Shiites could nudge the country back toward sectarian conflict.
The two soldiers were killed when assailants fired on an Iraqi military patrol in the former al-Qaeda stronghold city of Fallujah, according to police officials in the city about 40 miles west of Baghdad. Fallujah hospital officials confirmed the deaths.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.
The Associated Press
