BAGHDAD: On Sept. 2, 2008, US and Iraqi troops smashed in the doors of Iraqi journalist Ibrahim Jassam’s home, shouting “freeze” and holding back snarling dogs before they hauled him off into the night in his underwear.

A year later, neither Jassam and his family nor global news agency Reuters, which employed him as a freelance TV cameraman and photographer, have been told exactly why he has been detained for all this time by US forces in Iraq.

The evidence against Jassam is classified, but the accusations have to do with “activities with insurgents”, said Lt. Col. Pat Johnson, a spokeswoman for the US military in Iraq. “In a year of trying to get specifics, we’ve heard only vague and undefined accusations — to me this is unacceptable,” said David Schlesinger, editor in chief of Reuters. “It is only right and fair that any specific accusation against a journalist should be aired publicly and dealt with fairly and swiftly, with the journalist having the right to defend himself properly.”

Meanwhile, Jassam’s mother, Fadhila Alwan, is waiting impatiently to welcome him back to the family home in Mahmudiya, 30 km south of Baghdad, so she can see her son marry.

Alwan said when the soldiers came at 1 a.m., the family was sleeping on the roof to escape the heat of late summer. “Ibrahim told them he was a journalist and hadn’t done anything wrong. The Iraqi soldiers told him to shut his mouth,” Alwan said.

His sister, Layla Jassam, said she asked the Iraqi soldiers where they were taking Jassam. “If you knew where we were taking him you would weep and beat your head,” one replied, she said.

Jassam, who is being held in a prison camp built in the desert on the Iraq-Kuwait border, will eventually be released.

Under a US-Iraqi security pact, called a Status of Forces Agreement, the US military must hand over the thousands of Iraqis it still has in its custody as Iraq gradually regains its sovereignty more than six years after the US-led invasion.

Those facing Iraqi charges will be tried; the rest freed. The Iraqi Central Criminal Court already ruled last November there was no case against Jassam. But the US military says it considers Jassam a security threat to Iraq and under the security agreement, it is entitled to hold him as long as possible.

“Though we appreciate the decision of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq in the Ibrahim Jassam case, their decision does not negate the intelligence information that currently lists him as a threat to Iraqi security,” Johnson said.

Reuters argues the US army is misinterpreting its remit. “Ibrahim Jassam has never been charged by the US military or the Iraqi authorities, and has never had a single piece of evidence or even a specific allegation of wrongdoing presented to him,” said Thomson Reuters deputy general counsel Thomas Kim. “We believe this is not consistent with the spirit behind either the Status of Forces Agreement ... or the Rule of Law.”

The US military detained many Iraqi journalists during the sectarian slaughter and insurgency unleashed by the 2003 invasion. None have been known to have been charged.