Torture of Prisoners Still Seen in Iraq, Report Says

The Associated Press Monday 06 March 2006

London - Detainees in Iraq are still being tortured, receiving electric shocks and beatings with plastic cables, a report by Amnesty International said today.

The U.S. military responded that all detainees were being treated according to international conventions and Iraqi law.

Many of the cases in the report involve detainees held by Iraqi authorities. (You can read more about a case where US soldiers were ordered to walk away from this situation).

Amnesty International said that interviews in Jordan and Iraq with former prisoners, relatives of current inmates and lawyers involved in detainees' cases in Iraq showed that prisoner mistreatment had not ceased since the revelations in 2004 of abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

In the new allegations, former detainees asserted that they were beaten with plastic cables, given electric shocks and made to stand in a flooded room as an electrical current was passed through the water, the London-based human rights group said.

Its report said the interviews were conducted last year and this year.

On Sunday, sectarian violence killed at least five more people in Iraq. Three men died in a gunfight at a Sunni Muslim mosque in Baghdad, and two relatives of a top Sunni cleric were slain in a drive-by shooting.