[NYTr] Doctor tells of torture in Libyan jail for 13 months

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Simon McGuinness

The Irish Times - Jul 30, 2007
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2007/0730/1185230138892.html


Doctor tells of torture in Libyan jail for 13 months

by Kate Connolly in Berlin

Libya : The Palestinian doctor who was held in Libyan custody along with
five Bulgarian nurses on charges they infected hundreds of children with
HIV, has described in detail how they were tortured during their
eight-year ordeal.

Ashraf Alhajouj (38) said he was beaten, held in cages with police dogs
and given electric shocks, including to his private parts. He said that
he and the nurses were sometimes put together naked in the same room and
tortured.

In a harrowing first-person account, published in the latest edition of
the German news magazine Der Spiegel following the release of the six
last week, Dr Alhajouj described how following his initial arrest in
January 1999, along with the nurses, he was taken to a police dog
training centre outside Tripoli.

"For the first days I was locked up with three dogs who were ordered to
attack me. My leg is full of scars and marks from where they bit me
[and] I had a big hole in my knee," he said.

Later, he said, wire cable that had been stripped of its plastic
coating, was wound round his penis and he was dragged "screaming and
crying" across the floor. He was also given electric shocks with a
generator-style machine.

"They put the minus cable on my finger and the plus cable on my ear or
my genitals.

"The most painful thing was their ability to increase the speed of the
electricity flow. When I fell unconscious they would throw cold water
over my naked body and then begin all over again," he said.

The torture times were set for between 5pm and 5am and continued for 13
months. The nurses were submitted to similar treatment.

"Sometimes we were tortured in the same room. I saw them half-naked,
they saw me completely naked when I was being electrocuted. We heard
each others' whimpering, crying and screaming."

He said he saw the women being raped and watched as one of them broke a
piece of glass from the window and cut her wrists when she could not
bear it any longer.

Dr Alhajouj, who is temporarily living in Bulgaria, denies the charges
that he and the nurses infected 426 Libyan children with HIV. He
described the hygiene conditions at Bengazi hospital, where he went to
work in 1998, as "catastrophic".

"We had no needles, the sterilisation apparatus was broken and there was
only one pair of scissors to cut the umbilical cord of a dozen
newborns". He said he planned to sue his torturers.

- (Guardian service)

C 2007 The Irish Times