CPTnet
May 19, 2004
IRAQ: Khaled's return
by Le Anne Clausen
In April, Matthew Chandler, Le Anne Clausen, and Jane MacKay Wright had
lunch with the family of friends whose brother-in-law Khaled was detained
and then released by U.S. forces. [See April 1, 2004 release, "The Search
for Khaled."]
Khaled testified that he was returning to his home by car at night, driving
quickly due to the lack of security in the city. He passed an unmarked,
unlit U.S. checkpoint which soldiers had set up that night while conducting
a nearby house raid. U.S. soldiers fired four times into his vehicle.
Soldiers took him out of the car, pushed him onto the car's hood, and pushed
his face down. They blindfolded and handcuffed him and took him to a
military base. Neighbors who witnessed the event said that the soldiers
offered no warning before firing into the vehicle.
Khaled, who was uninjured by the shooting, said that he was treated well
during his six-day incarceration, except for the first night when a female
soldier was verbally abusive towards him. Soldiers secured his hands behind
his back with plastic zip-cuffs overnight, but the next morning they moved
the cuffs to the front so he could eat and drink. He said
that prisoners were only allowed one blanket, but somehow he managed to grab
two. [Temperatures at the time were around 40F at night.]
Khaled said that he went on a hunger strike for the first three days of his
incarceration because he felt he was unjustly imprisoned. After that time,
guards threatened to take him to the hospital and put him on an IV if he
didn't begin to eat. He then decided to eat.
Soldiers detained Khaled at the Tasferat military base for less than one day
before transferring him to the Shaab Stadium/BSA' U.S. military base, which
contains the former Iraqi police academy. For the rest of Khaled's
incarceration, soldiers kept him in the former restaurant of the police
academy, which is being used as a large prison cell. [When CPT workers
Wright and Clausen went to this military
base, U.S. military officers from the 501st Infantry denied, on three
separate occasions, that they were detaining people there.]
The rest of the prisoners with Khaled were also treated well, but another
group of prisoners arrived who had several broken bones and said they had
been beaten by soldiers from the Iraq Civil Defense Corps (ICDC), the
US-trained and supervised Iraqi military force. Khaled's sister added that
the ICDC are known among Iraqis for being brutal and the [US trained] Iraq
Police are only a little better. She had been at a gas queue when ICDC beat
a man severely for getting into an argument with the gas station manager.
While his siblings continued to give team members more details of his
incarceration, Khaled himself did not seem eager to discuss the ordeal. He
sat quietly for a while, and excused himself from the gathering.
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