8/4/2004 7:00:00 PM GMT
Source: Dailytimes.com
Guards at Guantanamo prison mocked and cursed Islam, made jokes about the Qur’an and refused to call prisoners to the prayers, a freed British detainee said on Tuesday.
In a statement that was released through his lawyer, Tarek Dergoul, 26, a former care worker from London, said that guards beat him and forced him to look at pornographic magazines. “One interrogator grabbed the Qur’an with his feet up on the table and read it like he was reading a magazine.
He made jokes about the Qur’an,” the statement said, describing one interrogation session. “The guards would swear at Muslims and curse Allah and Prophet Mohammed (PBUH),” Dergoul said, adding that he joined other prisoner on hunger strike to protest at the treatment of the Qur’an.
Although a loudspeaker system was set up to call Muslims for prayers five times a day as required, this right was also violated, Dergoul, the son of a Moroccan baker, said in the statement.
“They would make it play five times a day, or sometimes they would not play it,” he said. “They played it at the wrong time, and mocked it with their own voices, saying ‘Allah Akbar’. Sometimes they would not play it for a week.”
He also said that he was kept inside an isolation block for talking to other inmates and translating from Arabic to English without permission.
Also alleging beatings, including one in which he was knocked unconscious, Dergoul said interrogators routinely used intimidation.
“They threatened to send me to Morocco and Egypt, where I would be tortured. They played U.S. music very loud during interrogations. They brought pictures of naked women and dirty magazines and put them on the floor,” he said. Dergoul’s lawyer, Louise Christian, said the allegations uncovered various sorts of abuse and torture at the centre. “The picture which emerged from Tarek Dergoul’s signed witness statement is one of a systematic regime of abuses directed and ordered by the top officials and aimed at forcing detainees to make false statements in interrogations,” she said.