Pentagon: US soldier kicked Koran

The Pentagon has admitted for the first time that a soldier deliberately kicked the Koran at Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, and that an interrogator stepped on the Muslim holy book and was later sacked for “a pattern of unacceptable behaviour”.

In other confirmed incidents, a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed a detainee and his Koran at the Cuba jail; water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Korans to get wet; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran.

The findings, released after normal business hours last night, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig Gen Jay Hood, the commander of the detention centre in Cuba, that was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report - later retracted – that a US soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee’s Koran down a toilet.

The story stirred worldwide controversy and the Bush administration blamed it for deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan.

Hood said in a written statement last night, along with the new details, that his investigation “revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Koran dating back almost two years”.

A spokesman for defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Lawrence Di Rita, did not address the confirmed incidents of mishandling the Muslim holy book. Reached while travelling with Rumsfeld in Asia, Di Rita said that US Southern Command policy called for “serious, respectful and appropriate” handling of the Koran.

“The Hood inquiry would appear to affirm that policy,” Di Rita said.

Hood said that of nine mishandling cases that were studied in detail by reviewing thousands of pages of written records, five were confirmed to have happened. He could not determine conclusively whether the four others took place.

In one of those four unconfirmed cases, a detainee in April 2003 complained to FBI and other interrogators that guards “constantly defile the Koran”. The detainee alleged that in one instance a female military guard threw a Koran into a bag of wet towels to anger another detainee, and he also alleged that another guard said the Koran belonged in the toilet and that guards were ordered to do these things.

Hood said he found no other record of this detainee mentioning any Koran mishandling. The detainee has since been released.

In the most recent confirmed case, Hood said a detainee complained on March 25, 2005, of urine splashing on him and his Koran. An unidentified guard admitted at the time that “he was at fault”, the Hood report said, although it did not say whether the act was deliberate. The guard’s supervisor reprimanded him and assigned him to gate guard duty, where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at Guantanamo Bay.

As described in the Hood report, the guard had left his observation post and went outside to urinate.

He urinated near an air vent and the wind blew the urine through the vent into the cell block. The incident was not further explained.

In another of the confirmed cases, a contract interrogator stepped on a detainee’s Koran in July 2003 and then apologised. “The interrogator was later terminated for a pattern of unacceptable behaviour, an inability to follow direct guidance and poor leadership,” the Hood report said.

Hood also said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Korans. “These included using a Koran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Koran, attempting to flush a Koran down the toilet and urinating on the Koran,” Hood’s report said. It offered no possible explanation for those alleged abuses.

In the most recent of those 15 cases, a detainee on February 18, 2005, allegedly ripped up his Koran and handed it to a guard, stating that he had given up on being a Muslim. Several of the guards witnessed this, Hood reported.

Last week, Hood disclosed that he had confirmed five cases of mishandling of the Koran, but he refused to provide details. Allegations of Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay have led to anti-American passions in many Muslim nations, although Pentagon officials have insisted that the problems were relatively minor and that US commanders had gone to great lengths to enable detainees to practise their religion in captivity.

Hood said last week that he found no credible evidence that a Koran was flushed down a toilet. He said a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Koran in the toilet had since told Hood’s investigators that he never witnessed any form of Koran desecration.

Other prisoners who were returned to their home countries after serving time at Guantanamo Bay as terror suspects have alleged Koran desecration by US guards and some have said a Koran was placed in a toilet.

There are about 540 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about the al-Qaida terrorist network.