Low key Mideast media reaction to photos

Photographs of British soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq were decried in the Arab media today as shameful but were not receiving the same intense attention as the images of US abuses at Abu Ghraib prison last year.

“A new torture scandal with British heroes,” read a headline in the pan-Arab daily newspaper al-Hayat, under a photo of a soldier kicking a curled-up prisoner.

The photo and article were on the bottom half of the paper’s front page.

The release of the images on Tuesday night may have been too late to meet the press time for Middle Eastern newspapers, perhaps explaining why many of the photos were played on inside pages and with only brief articles in Egyptian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Emirates newspapers.

There have been no editorials or commentaries yet, though the outrage that erupted over Abu Ghraib is likely to be repeated if coverage of the latest prison scandal intensifies. However, the British images are less graphic and may be seen as just a continuation of abuses by occupying forces in Iraq.

Another pan Arab newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat, printed only one photo on an inside page and apologised for not publishing the others, “because some of them are shameful.”

The Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television network, with millions of viewers across the Middle East, showed some of the images. But the new photos did not lead the news bulletins like the Abu Ghraib scandal did last April.

One militant Islamic Web site angrily condemned the “new humiliating pictures.” One of the eight photos on the site showed two naked men; the site titled it “Forced to practice homosexuality.” Another, of the soldier kicking the prisoner curled up in a foetal position in a pool of blood, was captioned: “Kicking until death; and thanks for the liberation.”

Last year, images of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison being humiliated by smiling US military police caused outrage in the Middle East and fuelled anger among extremists, some of whom said their kidnappings of foreigners were in retaliation for the abuse.

Last week, the accused ringleader of the Abu Ghraib scandal, army Specialist Charles Graner, was jailed for 10 years.