Iraqi interior ministry accuses 57 employees of torture

Iraq’s Interior Ministry has charged 57 employees, including a police general, with human rights abuses over the alleged torture of hundreds of detainees at a prison in eastern Baghdad, a ministry spokesman said today.

Police Brig. Abdel-Karim Khalaf said the charges marked the first time officers in Iraq’s post-occupation police force had been charged with the crime of torture.

The names of the accused were being withheld pending their trials, but Khalaf said the general had already received administrative punishments under the force’s guidelines.

Others charged included 19 officers, 20 non-commissioned officers and 17 patrolmen or civilian employees of the ministry, he said. All have been removed from their jobs, Khalaf said.

“All of these people will stand trial and the court will decide their fate,” Khalaf said.

Khalaf said the charges were the first brought against high ranking police officers over allegations of torture, considered widespread among the poorly trained force which has suffered heavy losses at the hands of Sunni insurgents, Shiite militiamen and criminal gangs.

He said the torture had been recorded at a prison in eastern Baghdad called simply Site No.4, but declined to give details about specific abuses.

“The crime is the same regardless of the kind or form of the torture,” Khalaf said.

Previously, discipline over such allegations mainly was limited to dismissal and transfers, despite evidence that many policemen on the Shiite-dominated force were abetting the work of sectarian death squads blamed for killing scores of Sunnis in revenge attacks after the bombing of a major Shiite shrine in February.

Such concerns were underscored by the discovery of a police torture chamber in Baghdad last year, along with the apparent complicity of police in a mass kidnapping of Sunni workers that prompted authorities to take an entire police brigade out of service for retraining.

Officials say they plan to eventually retrain all 26 national police battalions – the Interior Ministry’s paramilitary units – and weed out those suspected of ties to sectarian militias and criminal gangs.

Iraqi detainees are often held in overcrowded cells with little sanitation, while alleged abuses include starvation and beatings, either as a prelude to execution or to extract information.

Torture was routine under the regime of former president Saddam Hussein and many Iraqis were enraged by reports of detainee torture and other abuses in prisons run by the US military following the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam.