http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?id=31961&pubdate=2004-05-15
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,299964,00.html
German television reported Friday that US troops tortured to death an Iraqi prisoner in their custody in January this year and captured the abuse on film.
Spiegel TV said in a statement that it had witness accounts and documents to prove that 47-year-old Asad Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel had been killed at the US military base Al Asad west of the town Khan Al Baghdadi.
The investigative news program said that he had been picked up on the open road and taken to the base on suspicion of belonging to an insurgent group.
"A fellow prisoner gave Spiegel TV a detailed description how the man was sadistically tortured in the five days after his arrest," the statement said. "US soldiers also took photos of this abuse."
The US occupation in Iraq has been rocked by a series of photographs showing abuse of Iraqi detainees by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
Spiegel TV said that US forces had tried to cover up the death of the prisoner at Al Asad by declaring in a report that he had "died in his sleep" in a document signed by pathologist Luis A. Santiago. The death certificate stated that no autopsy had been conducted.
But an Iraqi coroner who received the body of the prisoner from US forces told Spiegel TV that mans body showed "clear signs of torture".
"The photographs of the corpse, which Spiegel TV has also seen, indicate the man was tortured," it said, adding that the body also appeared to have undergone an autopsy using "Western methods".
It said the man was a married father of seven, including seven-month-old twins.
Employees of the Iraqi medical examination institute in Baghdad told Spiegel TV that they had seen other torture victims among the corpses handed over to them by the International Committee of the Red Cross on behalf of the US military.
Spiegel TV said that Iraqi coroners were told not to conduct an autopsy if an American death certificate was provided, even if the cause of death appeared not to correspond to the injuries.
Two British Moslems released from Guantanamo Bay were subjected to the same kinds of torture at the US detention camp that Iraqis have suffered at the hands of US troops, their lawyer said Friday.
Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, from Tipton, near Birmingham in Englands West Midlands, have written to US President George W. Bush to detail a string of abuses which, they claim, were inflicted upon them by US interrogators.