Suspected torture centre found in Nassariyah

US Marines said yesterday they had found photographs of burned bodies and a device to deliver electric shocks in what they suspect was a torture centre used

Files, documents and identity cards litter the floor of the low building in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya. US Marines who occupy the city believe it used to be an office of Saddam’s Baath Party or of the Iraqi intelligence service.

The most sinister part of the building is a dark corner room without windows. Five small cells lead off this room and in one of them was a battery connected to an iron rod which Marine Captain Pete McAleer said was “probably a primitive torture device”.

“It can definitely create a shock and who knows what they did with the iron rod that was electrified,” Capt McAleer told reporters.

A metal chair was found nearby, suggesting a kind of “electric chair”, he added.

The dark room “can’t have been for good things”, Capt McAleer said, adding it was a “reasonable assumption” the building had been used as a torture centre. The corner room is now blackened by fire. Since US Marines found the building, local people have entered it and, according to McAleer, deliberately set fire to the room.

“I think they’re trying to eradicate what was going on here,” he said.

Lance-Corporal James Jeffreyssaid he had at first taken it to be a police sub-station.

But when he reached the dark cellhe said: “It was obvious that the way they would treat the prisoners here isn’t what you’d find in most police facilities around the world.”

“We recovered photographs here that were on the floor in a pile that depicted bodies that had been burned. From the positions of the bodies, it appeared they may have been alive when they were ignited,” Jeffreys, of Oxnard, California, said. He said there had been no one - alive or dead - in the building when the Marines first came upon it.

Capt McAleer, of San Diego, California, said the files found in the building suggested the Iraqi security services kept tabs on a lot of people.

“(It’s) just too much like Nazi Germany to me,” he said.

No one had come forward to say they had been tortured at this particular building, McAleer said, but he said the Marines had met people in Nassiriya who said they had been mistreated. At a different location in southern Iraq last weekend, British troops found the dessicated remains of as many as 200 people in an abandoned warehouse along with catologues of grisly photographs of what could be torture victims.