Taliban prisoners plead for food

Taliban prisoners of war claim they are being mistreated.

Three thousand captured fighters at Shibergan prison, about 75 miles from the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, are jammed into a facility meant to hold 200 prisoners.

About 30 inmates are packed into each 6ft by 9ft cell.

There are no beds and so little room that prisoners have to sleep sitting on the concrete floor. Many prisoners have no shoes.

Toilets at the back of each cellblock are emptied directly into huge, open-air, swamps.

"Everyone's ill. Everyone's got diarrhoea," said Omer Niseer, a 20-year-old Pakistani, who has been at the prison for a month.

Omer Niseer, and several others, complained they get only one tiny meal a day, usually some bread that has to split with three other inmates.

Fellow prisoner Hafiz Ihsan Saeed pointed to the untreated, infected shrapnel wound in his chest, his bare feet on the freezing concrete floor and his empty stomach and pleaded for help on behalf of all the Taliban inmates at prison.

"We have not eaten in 22 hours," he said. "We have a lot of weakness. Just standing I feel dizzy."

General Bek Gorabic, the prison warden, insists there is plenty of food and the inmates were served two large meals a day. He then showed seven huge vats of cooking rice.

The prisoners said they only eat well when Red Cross officials were visiting.