15/05/2005
WASHINGTON: Allegations that US guards at the Guantanamo Bay in Cuba threw Holy Quran in the toilet surfaced more than a year ago but it was not until this week when riots broke out in Afghanistan that the US military ordered an investigation. So far, no evidence has been found to support the alleged desecration, senior US defence officials said. “We’ll do our best to establish any truth behind this. I don’t even want to call it an allegation. It’s an alleged allegation,” said Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman. “We’ve not seen any specific allegation. We’ve seen an article in a news magazine that says this may have happened.” A report in Newsweek magazine last week said interrogators allegedly tried to flush the Holy Quran down a toilet to rattle Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo. Four days of riots in Afghanistan that left 14 people dead and over 100 injured was the worst incident of anti-American protests since 2001. Defence officials said General Bantz Craddock, head of the US Southern Command, ordered an investigation on Tuesday, the day protests erupted in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. Three British detainees who were released from Guantanamo in March 2004 alleged that Guantanamo guards kicked and threw around the Holy Quran and on occasion threw them in buckets that served as toilets. “The guards’ behaviour towards our religious practices as well as the Quran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible,” Asif Iqbal, one of the three said. “It is clear to me that the conditions in our cells and our general treatment were designed by the officers in charge of the interrogation process to soften us up,” he said. The Quran-treatment was one of the issues that prompted hunger strikes at the prison, according to the Britons. In January, lawyers for Kuwaiti detainees at Guantanamo said after a visit that their clients also described being taunted by guards who on at least one occasion threw a Quran in a toilet. “Several of our clients did tell us that the guards had desecrated the Quran,” Kristine Huskey, one of the lawyers said. Defence officials said they did not know whether there had been any previous investigations into the allegation. Huskey said she was certain the military did not look into the allegations at the time. Lawyers defending Guantanamo detainees have called for an independent investigation. Pentagon officials said that while no evidence had been found of guards defiling Quran, investigators did find an entry in an interrogation log that said a guard alleged that a detainee had ripped out pages of a Quran and stuffed it in a toilet as a protest. “It’s early to say how solid that is, but so far there are indications that a detainee may have done something like this,” said DiRita. Pentagon officials said the violent protests were less a spontaneous upheaval over the allegations than a calculated campaign by an organised opposition. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday said the US commander in Afghanistan, Lt Gen Karl Eikenberry, had recounted that the violence appeared to be related to efforts by the Afghan government to bring former Taliban supporters into the political process. SOURCE: AFP via Daily Times |
