Witness at Saddam trial tells of abuse (AP) Updated: 2005-12-06 21:04
But on Tuesday, the ousted leader and his former officials sat largely
silently, listening intently as Witness A spoke.
She described four years in Saddam's prisons after she and other families
were swept up in Dujail following the shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade. She
said she was held and tortured at a detention facility there before being taken
to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Later they were taken to a
desert facility outside the southern city of Samawa.
At the Dujail facility, she said she was thrown into a room with red walls
and ceiling in an intelligence department building and that prisoners were given
only bread and water to eat.
"I could not even eat because of the torture," she said.
At Abu Ghraib, the guards stripped one of her male relatives, a deaf mute,
and tied a rope to his genitalia, pulling him into the cells where the women
were kept, she said.
She said one of her relatives wanted to give birth in jail. "The baby was
out. When some women tried to help her, the guards prevented them," and the baby
died, she said.
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