Torturers left my dead pal’s body in cell with me for days

originalmente por: Birmingham Correo
publicado: 24de noviembre 2010

The tears fall from his eyes and Mohammed* wrings his hands as he recalls his former cell mate. We’re sitting on brown leather sofas in a cool blue room decorated with cushions, throws and floral prints. But Mohammed is not really here. He’s back in his hot, cramped cell in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, the terrible smell of his friend’s decomposing body filling his nostrils.

“I couldn’t recognise him,” says the 30-year-old Iraqi Kurd. “They had dropped a concrete block on his face. It must have weighed 30kg.

“Then they left his body in our cell. “It is very hot in Southern Iraq. “The body swelled up. It was bloody, it was smelly and they left it there for four days.”

When exactly this happened, Mohammed cannot say as his experiences have left him unable to remember his life chronologically. From the age of 14 a 24 – when he fled to the UK on the back of a lorry – the Iraqi Kurd spent his life in and out of prison, jailed for his ethnicity and his late father’s political affiliations.

His most humiliating and horrific experiences were at Abu Ghraib at the height of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Heavy gas cylinders were hung from his testicles, his body was tied up for days at a time so that he could not sit or lie down and he was electrocuted through wires attached to his nipples.

Read part2 of this article >