KABUL, 21 May 2005 — Two detainees in US military custody in Afghanistan in 2002 died after being severely beaten as part of a pattern of abuse by young and badly-trained soldiers, the New York Times reported yesterday quoting from a leaked US Army criminal investigation report. Although the two deaths were reported earlier, the graphic details of their abuse come at a sensitive time in Afghanistan after at least 14 people were killed in anti-US demonstrations this month sparked by an erroneous report that a Qur’an had been desecrated by US investigators at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The White House said that investigations were under way into prisoner abuse by US soldiers in Afghanistan. “Absolutely, this is being investigated thoroughly,” Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, told reporters yesterday. “There are criminal investigations going on right now about what this newspaper article discusses. People are being held to account. People that did the offensive acts in Abu Ghraib are being sentenced and will serve some time for what they did,” Duffy added.
The 2,000-page file on incidents at the Bagram detention center near Kabul shows repeated incidents of maltreatment and has echoes of the scandal surrounding the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “Sometimes the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom, cruelty, or both,” the report said. Over two years later, only seven soldiers have been charged, including four last week, but no one has been convicted in either death.
Most of those who could still face legal action have denied wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or in comments to a reporter. Dilawar, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver detained on suspicion of involvement in a rocket attack on a US military base in the southeastern province of Khost received over 100 blows to the legs and an autopsy found that the tissue in his legs had been pulverized.
“I’ve seen similar injuries on an individual run over by a bus,” Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, a coroner and a major at the time said in the classified US report, the Times said. By the time Dilawar underwent his final investigations, interrogators believed he was innocent, the report added. Dilawar’s torture and subsequent death in December 2002 echoed that of another Afghan, Habibullah, who died of a heart attack six days earlier. The report said it was likely to have been caused by a blood clot produced by repeated blows to the legs.
An investigation into abuse of detainees in US military custody in Afghanistan conducted by Gen. Charles H. Jacobi in 2004 remains classified, although US military spokesmen insist that prisoners at Bagram, the main US detention facility in Afghanistan, are now being treated humanely.
Meanwhile, Afghan authorities said yesterday that kidnapped Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni was still alive, and they were working hard to secure her release. “We are working hard to release her safely,” presidential spokesman Khaleeq Ahmad told Agence France Presse in Kabul.
Some media organizations reported that Temur Shah, the alleged kidnapper of the 32-year-old Italian aid worker, had killed Cantoni on Thursday night after President Hamid Karzai’s government refused to accept his demands. “We have no such report,” Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said but stopped short of issuing an outright rebuttal of Shah’s claims.
An Interior Ministry official said that up to 10:00 a.m. (0530 GMT) government officials were in contact with the kidnappers and had no report of her death. “We have accurate information that she is safe,” a high-ranking police official told AFP separately. Cantoni, 32, who works for CARE International, was dragged from her car by armed men in the Qala-e-Mosa district of Kabul on Monday evening. Talks between Afghan authorities and the kidnappers have run into difficulties after a delegation of tribal elders brought from the eastern province of Logar failed to mediate between the government and the abductors.
