Saddam’s Horrors Surface
Wednesday April
23, 2003
Agence France Presse NEW YORK/BAGHDAD, 23 April 2003 — Uday, Saddam Hussein’s feared
elder son and president of the Iraq National Olympic Committee, tortured
footballers who played below par, Time magazine reports in its latest
issue. Players had their feet scalded and toenails ripped off for failing to
win and allegations of torture were investigated by the international
football federation FIFA. However Time says the investigations failed because no player would
dare admit to suffering such abuse for fear of even worse. Time however says it has found what may be the first tangible
evidence pointing to torture in Uday’s own backyard, the
administrative compound of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee in
central Baghdad. Hidden in a pile of dead leaves, 20 meters from the building housing
the Iraqi Football Association, was an iron maiden. Big enough to house
a grown man, the sarcophagus-shaped device is a large, metal closet with
long spikes on the inside door that closes to impale its victim. The one found in Baghdad was clearly worn from use, its nails having
lost some of their sharpness. It lay on its side within view of Uday’s
first-floor offices in the soccer association. The torture device was brought to Time’s attention by a group of
looters who had been stripping the compound of anything of value. They
had left behind the iron maiden, believing it to be worthless. US troops found scores of pages on torture printed from websites when
they inspected Uday’s wrecked sports center inside the presidential
compound. Uday is the Ace of Hearts, No. 3 on the US military’s
“most wanted” deck of cards. A new Iraqi human rights group said in Baghdad that tens of thousands
of highly classified documents recording executions, arrests and
interrogations under Saddam’s regime have been recovered. “We have so many files and there are more coming in every day,”
the founder of the Committee to Free Prisoners, Ibrahim Al-Edrisy, told
AFP from the group’s base at the luxury residence of a former
intelligence officer. Edrisy said committee members and other
“volunteers” began recovering the files from buildings and
residences that belonged to the feared security branches of Saddam’s
regime as soon as news broke that the Iraqi dictator had lost power. He said many documents were burned and destroyed by officials who
were loyal to Saddam or who feared they could leave behind incriminating
evidence. “But many have also been saved. We will use this to help all
the people who have suffered,” Edrisy said. Inside one room of the building were more than 150 cabinets full of
files, most of which were marked “highly classified” in red. The
wall of another room was piled high with more files. One file read by an AFP reporter contained the 1983 execution orders
for 65 people accused of being associated to the Al-Dawa party, a Shiite
group with close links to Iran that Saddam relentlessly tried to
eradicate. A military court that oversaw treason and security hearings,
Ath-Thawra, issued the two bulk execution orders on April 27 and July 8
in 1983 for all the accused to be hanged. Aged between 21 and 35, the group covered a wide spectrum of society,
with their professions ranging from unemployed people to schoolteachers,
students, soldiers, a shoemaker and an engineer. Another file marked
“highly confidential” recorded the 1989 execution of Abed Ali Jabboh,
whose crime was to try to flee the Iraqi Army. His file listed the
method of execution as “shooting”. |
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