Secret Iraqi government prison was 'worse than Abu Ghraib'

Inmates at covert jail suffered routine electric shocks and sexual abuse

A secret Iraqi government prison, where detainees were subjected to horrific abuse and at least one died from his injuries, was described yesterday as being "worse than Abu Ghraib".

Its prisoners, who were mainly Sunni Arabs, included a wheelchair-bound British national. Freed captives told the New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch that they were raped, tortured with electric shocks and suffocated.

All had been taken to the covert jail, at Muthanna airfield west of Baghdad, after being arrested by security forces and accused of involvement in the long-running insurgency. Following American pressure, the prison was hurriedly closed last week and its 431 inmates were transferred to the Iraqi capital as reports of torture emerged.

The revelations come at a tense time for Iraq, which is in a political impasse following national elections and is also trying to tackle a renewed outbreak of sectarian violence.

Human Rights Watch managed to speak to about 300 captives following their transfer to Baghdad's al-Rusafa detention centre. Many of them gave harrowing details of their treatment.

A former Iraqi army officer aged 68, who lives in England and holds joint British and Iraqi citizenship, was arrested while visiting Iraq to track down his missing son. When British diplomats from Baghdad visited the detainee, he said he had been beaten, sodomised and had electrical charges attached to his genitals.

"They applied electricity to my penis and sodomised me with a stick," the man later told Human Rights Watch. "I was forced to sign a confession that they would not let me read."

Another inmate, 24, was punched and kicked so badly that he suffered serious leg injuries and his front teeth were knocked out. He began wetting his bed after being sodomised with a broomstick and a pistol.

A 21-year-old student, arrested in Mosul in December, said he was blindfolded, handcuffed, stripped naked and then raped by another prisoner as guards laughed at his screams of pain.

An internal US embassy report into the prison added: "One prisoner [said] he had been raped on a daily basis. Another showed his undergarments, which were entirely bloodstained".

Joe Stork, the Human Rights Watch director in the Middle East, said: "The horror we found suggests that torture was the norm in Muthanna. What happened is an example of the horrendous abuse Iraqi leaders say they want to leave behind. Everyone responsible, from the top on down, needs to be held accountable."

The US military's strategy for pulling its forces out of Iraq is predicated on a scaling-down of violence. Washington has been trying to broker a deal between the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and his opposition rival, Iwad Allawi, who narrowly won the election and leads an alliance that describes itself as non-sectarian.

US diplomats warned yesterday that the latest reports of prisoner abuse could further aggrieve Sunni Muslims, who have seen two elected MPs disqualified from office for alleged past links to the Ba'ath Party of Saddam Hussein. Mr Maliki is personally implicated in the row. Most of the Sunni detainees at Muthanna were from Nineveh province where the Prime Minister, who leads a Shia party, has been accused of carrying out a vendetta against people associated with Saddam's regime. The prison was under the control of the Baghdad Operations Command, a task force which answers to Mr Maliki.

Yesterday, he claimed the captives were persuaded to make false complaints by opposition politicians. "They had given themselves scars by rubbing matches on some of their body parts," he said. "These are lies, a smear campaign by some foreign embassies and the media. There are no secret prisons in Iraq at all."

Mr Maliki pointedly referred to what happened at Abu Ghraib – the US military prison in Baghdad where troops systematically abused inmates.

"America is the symbol of democracy but then you have the abuse at Abu Ghraib," said the Prime Minister. "The American government took tough measures and we are doing the same, so where is the problem and why this raucousness?"

After meeting some of the freed Muthanna detainees, a Sunni leader from Nineveh, Sheikh Abdullah Humedi Ajeel al-Yawar, said: "This place was much worse than Abu Ghraib. What they have been doing is terrible. Abu Ghraib was a picnic in comparison."

Wijdan Salim, the Iraqi human rights minister, also directly contradicted Mr Maliki's account, saying she visited the Muthanna jail and found evidence of activity which was "against human rights and law".

Secret prisons have always existed – as I discovered for myself in Iraq

*Secret prisons into which detainees disappear to be tortured, sometimes never to be seen alive again, are not new to Iraq – before or after its "liberation". Opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime suffered in these dungeons, which also began to appear during the savage civil war following the US-led invasion. One of the most notorious was in the Karrada district of Baghdad where 169 abused and starving captives were found by the US military and Iraqi police five years ago. They were being held in the bunker of a building owned by the Interior Ministry which had passed into the hands of the Shia Badr militia. Bayan Jabr, the then Interior Minister, was a former Badr commander. The discovery of the detainees, some of whom appear to have been flayed, did not affect his position and he continued to serve in the cabinet. There were, however, other repercussions. Foreign journalists, including myself, saw the troops going into the underground complex from our hotel, followed them and wrote about the appalling scenes we witnessed. A week later, our hotel was the target of suicide bombings, which killed around a dozen people in adjoining buildings. The attack was typical of the sort carried out by Sunni insurgents at the time, but they had not – until then – targeted the foreign media. A colleague and I asked an American brigadier-general, who had arrived in the aftermath of the blast, why the Sunnis should want to blow up journalists. "What makes you think it was the Sunnis?" he asked. His view and that of many others, American and Iraqi, was that the bombing had been organised by figures in the Interior Ministry who had simply got fed up with stories about government-run death squads.