Campaigners seek Iraq abuses probe
Human rights campaigners have called on the United States to investigate how much its officials knew about alleged torture and other ill-treatment of detainees held by Iraqi security forces. The call from Amnesty International followed the leak of nearly 400,000 US military documents on Iraq, which reportedly contain accounts of abuse and misconduct by Iraqi authorities and US forces.
There are also some allegations of abuse by UK soldiers, the Guardian reported.
The archive comes after 90,000 files chronicling civilian deaths and other incidents in Afghanistan were controversially published by the site in July.
A spokesman for Amnesty International said the new disclosures appeared closely to match the findings of New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq, a report it published last month detailing alleged widespread torture and other ill-treatment of detainees by Iraqi forces.
He added that thousands of Iraqis who had been detained by US forces were transferred from US to Iraqi custody between early 2009 and July 2010 under an agreement between the US and Iraq that contained no provisions for ensuring protection of the detainees' human rights.
Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa director Malcolm Smart said: "We have not yet had an opportunity to study the leaked files in detail but they add to our concern that the US authorities committed a serious breach of international law when they summarily handed over thousands of detainees to Iraqi security forces who, they knew, were continuing to torture and abuse detainees on a truly shocking scale.
"These documents apparently provide further evidence that the US authorities have been aware of this systematic abuse for years, yet they went ahead and handed over thousands of Iraqis they had detained to the Iraqi security forces."
According to the Guardian, the Iraq logs detail how US authorities allegedly failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.
There are "numerous" reports of detainee abuse, describing prisoners being shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks with six ending with a detainee's apparent death, the paper reported.
(google.com/hosted news)
Copyright © 2010 The Press Association.
=============================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment