Hassan an-Ni'ami, imam at a mosque in Baghdad's Adhimiya district and a senior official of the Muslim Clerics Association, probably was a supporter of resistance to the US forces in Iraq. A month ago he was captured by Iraqi paramilitary police forces from the 'Rapid Intrusion brigades', in a family home in the Sha'ab neighbourhood of northern Baghdad. Twenty-four hours later he was dead.

What happened to him in his 24 hours in captivity was written across his body in chapters of pain, recorded by the camera. There are police-issue handcuffs still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell. There are burn marks on his chest, as if someone has placed something very hot near his right nipple and moved it around.

A little lower are a series of horizontal welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.

An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni'ami seems to have been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a gun - the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.

What actually killed him however were the bullets fired into his chest at close range, probably by someone standing over him as he lay on the ground. The last two hit him in the head.

When the WMD's in Iraq appeared to be bogus, the US changed its tune, Iraq was now free of torture. Now it seems that the torture chambers are back, and the US en UK forces are doing sod all about it.

Link to Observer article
Mirror