LONDON, 4 August 2004 — Guards at the United States’ Guantanamo Bay prison mocked and cursed Islam, made jokes about the Qur’an and neglected to call prisoners to prayer, a freed British detainee alleged yesterday.
In a lengthy statement released through his lawyer, Tarek Dergoul, 26, a former care worker from London, also said that guards beat him and forced him to look at pornographic magazines.
Dergoul was one of five Britons released in March from the naval base in Cuba used to incarcerate hundreds of suspected Al-Qaeda and Taleban supporters without charge.
Along with other freed Britons, Dergoul had previously alleged that prison guards beat and mistreated him, but yesterday’s statement went into far greater detail, notably with regards to claims of religious mockery.
“One interrogator grabbed the Qur’an with his feet up on the table and read it like he was reading a magazine. He made jokes about the Qur’an,” the statement said, recounting one interrogation session.
“The guards would swear at Muslims and curse Allah and Prophet Mohammed,” Dergoul said, adding that on several occasions he joined other inmates on hunger strike to protest at the treatment of the Qur’an.
Although a loudspeaker system was set up to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer five times a day as required, this was also abused, Dergoul, the son of a Moroccan baker, said in the statement. “They would make it play five times a day, or sometimes they would not play it,” he said.
“They played it at the wrong time, at times they mocked it with their own voices... Sometimes they would not play it for a week.” He also spoke of having spent 15 of the 22 months he was in Guantanamo inside an isolation block for talking to other inmates and translating from Arabic to English without permission.
Also alleging beatings, including one in which he was knocked unconscious, Dergoul said interrogators routinely used intimidation.
“They threatened to send me to Morocco and Egypt, where I would be tortured. They played US music very loud during interrogations. They brought pictures of naked women and dirty magazines and put them on the floor,” he said.
Dergoul’s lawyer, Louise Christian, said the allegations appeared to show a culture of abuse at the center.
“The picture which emerged from Tarek Dergoul’s signed witness statement is one of a systematic regime of abuses directed and ordered by the top command and aimed at forcing detainees to make false statements in interrogations,” she said.
Four British nationals remain locked up at Guantanamo, where US authorities consistently deny claims of mistreatment.
Christian urged Washington to hand over videos they say show US captors assaulting Muslim prisoners.
“It is essential that the British government actually sees the videos and does not just rely on what the US government tells them is in them,” she said. “We know these videos exist because the commander of Guantanamo Bay has confirmed this,” she added.
Rights campaigners fear tactics at Guantanamo Bay may have been similar to those notoriously used at the Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad where photos and videos emerged earlier this year of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners.
Dergoul said he was repeatedly attacked by a punishment squad known as the Extreme Reaction Force during his 22-month detention without charge.
“When the ERF were called, they were always accompanied by someone with a video camera,” said the 26-year-old, who was first detained in Afghanistan.
Dergoul’s accounts echo those of two other former British inmates who wrote an open letter to President George W. Bush alleging the use of shackles, dogs and loud music to torture them. London notes that no such claims were made during eight visits to British detainees at the US military base in Cuba.
Meanwhile, a Paris appeals court judge yesterday heard a request for the provisional release of four French nationals repatriated from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay and now under investigation in France for terror-related crimes.
Prosecutors have opposed the release of the four men. The judge was expected to deliver her ruling early today.
Mourad Benchellali, Nizar Sassi, Brahim Yadel and Imad Achab Kanouni were placed under investigation on Saturday on suspicion of criminal association in relation with a terrorist enterprise, four days after their return to France.
Benchellali and Sassi are also suspected of using false passports that allowed them to reach Afghanistan, where they were arrested by US forces on the border with Pakistan in December 2001.
