Ten prisoners suffocate in Iraqi custody

There is outrage in the Sunni section of Iraq today in response to the death of ten prisoners held in a small metal container for over 9 hours in over 100 degree Fahrenheit (40 degree celcius) heat. Eleven Sunni men had reportedly been near a construction site in Amariya, which had been the scene of a firefight between US troops and insurgents. They were detained after going to a hospital in the Abu Ghraib section of Baghdad, where "identified" by commandos as the same men "involved" in the firefight. According to the commandos, the proof of their guilt was their clothes, which they "recognized" and the fact that the men came from two Sunni tribes associated with the insurgency. After being chased and dragged out of the hospital, they were interrogated (allegedly tortured) and placed in the scorching metal container. The one survivor was able to reach his family via mobile phone.

The commandos who took the men prisoner are from the feared "First Brigade" of anti-terrorist forces, many who worked in the same capacity under Saddam Hussein. For an amazing report on the Iraqi counterinsurgency forces and the US support for them, read this Peter Maass story for the New York Times Magazine.

The New York Times also offers the most complete report of the deaths of the ten Sunni prisoners:

All accounts agreed that after the shooting, the minivan drove about seven miles back across northwestern Baghdad to Noor Hospital in Shuala, a mainly Shiite district that is close to Abu Ghraib. General Flaieh said men from the Special Security Unit, with casualties of their own from the Amariya shooting, arrived soon after and were told by hospital guards that there were wounded insurgents being treated in the emergency ward.

"When the commanders entered the ward with their injured men, they recognized the faces and the clothes of some of the other men there and said that they were the ones who had attacked them," said Dr. Khudair Abbas Muhammad, the hospital director.

"At that point, some of the men from Abu Ghraib began to run off," he said, "but the commandos set off after them, and there was chaos. Eventually, the commandos captured them all, including the injured men, and took them away. That was all we knew until we heard that the dead bodies of most of the men were delivered on Monday to the Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad."

An officer in a police unit attached to Yarmouk Hospital who requested anonymity because he feared reprisal said that an officer with the police commandos' First Brigade, Col. Muhammad Hmood, arrived at the hospital late on Sunday night, about 14 hours after the arrests at Noor Hospital. The officer said Colonel Hmood led attendants to four closed Chevrolet pick-ups carrying eight bodies and four men who were unconscious, two of whom subsequently died. "The colonel said the men were terrorists who had attacked an American convoy, and that they had accidentally suffocated," the police officer said.

The officer said that one of the men who arrived at Yarmouk hospital unconscious but later recovered was Mr. Saleh, the survivor quoted by the Muslim Clerics' Association. "Diya Saleh told us, 'The Interior Ministry commandos who arrested us at Noor Hospital put us in a van, and then took us out and tortured us,' " the officer said. "We called for doctors to look after the men still breathing, and then a pathologist came and looked at the bodies. He said that they had been tortured, with injuries caused by electric shocks."

Before dawn on Monday, the police officer said, four other police commandos arrived in a black Daewoo sedan, three of them wearing the commandos' black uniforms and a fourth in civilian clothes. The officer said that when the commandos demanded to know where Mr. Saleh was, the men assigned to the hospital police unit assumed they had come to kill him, to eliminate him as a witness. "So we called the officers at Mahmoun," the officer said, naming a local police station, "and asked them to help us. When they heard that, the commandos disappeared."

The police officer added, "What happened to those men from Abu Ghraib was a crime against the Iraqi people. When their relatives arrived to claim the bodies, I heard them saying many bad things about the police. With crimes like this, it's not hard to see why the insurgents keep on attacking the police. Those in authority should do something to stop it."