AMMAN - A leading US human rights group said on Friday beatings of inmates in Jordanian jails were rampant and many of the country’s top Islamist detainees were denied justice.Christoph Wilcke, Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Jordan specialist, speaking after a two-week tour of jails across the country, said detainees had cited serious abuses and beatings and told the group two prisoners died under torture since May. He said the HRW mission marked the first time Jordan had opened its five main prisons, including the intelligence headquarters’ main detention centre, to the scrutiny of a foreign human rights group. “There is a systematic policy of corporal punishment which is widespread and systematic, and under some directors in some prisons some of those beatings amount to torture,” he said.
Officials deny any systematic violation of prisonersÂ’ rights. But Wilcke said guards act with impunity. Methods include beatings with electric cables and truncheons and hanging inmates in cuffs for long periods, he said.
HRW carried out interviews with more than 100 detainees. Wilcke said around 350 inmates in the high security Swaqa jail, which holds several al Qaeda militants convicted over foiled plots to attack US and Israeli targets, caused serious self mutilation during a prison visit last Sunday. “When they saw us walk with the director through the corridors they feared they could not tell us their complaints so they then expressed themselves by slashing themselves,” he said.
| Drat. Who stopped them? |
Wilcke said they had wanted to protest an incident several days before when around 2,000 inmates, among them Islamists, had been beaten and humiliated for eight hours after the HRW team visited them and prisoners spoke of widespread abuse. “Everybody’s head and beard was shaved. For the religious prisoners this was to humiliate and degrade them, not for any legitimate penal reason. Every prisoner was beaten and people had not recalled this happened before,” Wilcke said.| Sucks to be a prisoner in an Arab state. No one's ever known that before. |
Security sources in Jordan say the rise in militancy is tied to growing anti-American sentiment since the invasion of Iraq.
Wilcke cited the case of a top security inmate, Jordanian Sheikh Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, 48, a leading Al Qaeda thinker, whom the group met and has been held in solitary confinement for over two and a half years without trial. “He ... has gone on hunger strikes to protest his detention and cannot choose his own lawyer to defend him,” Wilcke said.
| He's an al-Q honcho, and somehow I just can't work up any sympathy for him. |