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HORRIFIC SECRETS OF SADDAM'S POLICE HQ Apr 2 2003
From Tom Newton Dunn With 40 Commando In Abu Al Khasib, Southern Iraq
AS WE entered Abu Al Khasib's police station yesterday, there were at first no clues to betray what really went on inside.
The row of empty offices had file upon file in Arabic that we, perhaps naively, put down to routine police records.
Then, at the end of a corridor, we found the first cell.
A damp, 8ft by 4ft hole with no natural or artificial light and just a soiled pillow and filthy blanket on the floor.
It was one of six, some bigger, some even smaller, sealed by bolts from the outside attached to heavy metal cage doors. And all of them disgustingly filthy.
In one, a meat hook hung from the ceiling, in another a thick line of hose pipe sat on the floor, with no water taps for it to attach to anywhere in sight.
To the marines of 40 Commando and myself it was becoming abundantly clear the building in this captured suburb of Basra was, in fact, a house of torture used to inflict pain and suffering on possibly hundreds of civilians.
Confirmation came in an upstairs room, the contents of which made us shudder.
There were two rubber car tyres and a long electric lead attached to the mains — still live.
Then, in another part of the station, there were the bundles of Iraqi citizens' ID cards spread across the Chief of Police's abandoned large oak desk.
It is a jailable offence not to carry the cards and we stopped to wonder why these men, aged between 20 and 50, did not need theirs. Although we probably knew the answer.
The IDs had been found in a draw, gathering dust, and looked like the officer's sick personal collection.
ONE marine chief who had spent time in the Balkans on UN service told us his thoughts on the tyres and cable.
He said: "This is something we came across a lot in Bosnia.
"The interrogator would stand on the tyres while prodding the captive with the live cable. His own feet were insulated from the high voltage by the rubber.
"Primitive maybe, but a pretty effective and recognised form of torture in a lot of Third World countries.
"Electrocution is not only incredibly painful but also very frightening. The interrogators usually get more out of the shock effect of it rather than the actual pain the burns cause."
The officer is normally more than happy to talk to me on the record.
But this time he didn't want to be named so his wife back home would not get to hear what he had seen of torture — and never revealed to her.
Had the men in the ID cards been held at this police station, they would have been done so in appalling conditions.
The cells all stank of old faeces, urine and sweat. Spatters of dark liquid left stains down several walls, but they were too dirty and old for us to tell if it was blood.
Only one, the biggest, had the very roughest approximation of a toilet in it, a squat hole in the ground that judging by the dark, putrid gunge over-flowing from it hadn't been flushed in months.
And in an annex with all its window spaces filled in with breeze-blocks, was a far larger cell with an iron bed frame in the middle.
Upstairs were offices, most cluttered up with old green uniforms, half-eaten plates of food, and boxes of grenades and other heavy ammunition.
One contained a locked armoury that the marines shot open to reveal a huge stash of AK47s, RPGs and spare missile rounds — far too much weaponry needed just to police a normal civilian population.
It had taken 13 hours of constant fighting by 40 Commando with the help of two squadrons of tanks to take this town on Sunday.
But though Saddam Hussein's henchmen who ran it on Saturday have now disappeared, their legacy of terror remains.
The troops and I knew there was something strange about the police station as we approached it. Fortified by banks of sandbags, the grim, concrete block was the only other building in the town, along with the Ba'ath Party's abandoned HQ, the locals did not want to loot.
NONE of the crowd gathered outside to watch the men smash their way in wanted to speak about the place either.
Instead, they looked at their shoes when we tried to find out more from them.
Only after darkness fell did a man in his 30s approach 40 Commando's headquarters in an old Iraqi army barracks on the outskirts of town.
He gave his name as Dofia Abdullah and insisted he had important information the troops must act on.
Dofia said: he said: "The Ba'ath Party were bad people, they used to hurt people inside the police station.
"You say bad words about Saddam, they take you in there and you never come out.
"Everybody knew not to ask what happen to them there, then they disappear too. The Mukhabarat, they work in there also."
We still can't say for sure until more locals are ready and brave enough to come forward and testify about their former oppressors.
BUT everything we saw inside that building yesterday suggested it wasn't really a house of law and order at all.
It was a place in which to carry out horrific acts on fellow humans.
The presence of the dreaded Mukhabarat, Saddam's internal security services, was further testament to that.
Their sole aim has been to protect the dictator's political power base since he "assumed" leadership of the country in July 1979.
Mukhabarat men have controlled towns and cities with a reign of unbridled violence and terror.
A great number of its 9,000 personnel are relatives of Saddam — members of his Al-Bu Nasser tribe.
Either that or they come from towns close to his birth place, Tikrit, in north-central Iraq's "Sunni Arab Triangle". And in the rebellious south, populated by the persecuted Shi'ite Muslims and Marsh Arabs, the Mukhabarat's rule was all the more oppressive.
YESTERDAY'S search was supervised by Royal Marine Corporal Dominic Conway, 28, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
He said later: "It was a horrible, gruesome place and I didn't like it one little bit.
"They weren't policemen in there, not like we understand the term. They weren't even animals, because animals aren't that cruel.
I'm just sorry a few of them didn't decide to hang around a little longer to meet us.
"That would have been very interesting for them."
After two hours inside the police station with the search complete, we were all more than happy to leave.
The one tangible positive was that, for intelligence purposes, the mission produced a find of detailed maps of possible secret paramilitary strongholds. The normally jovial and chatty troop of commandos filed out of the building and blocked the police station's doors behind them in total silence.
VERY little was said between us on the 30-minute patrol back to base — for once, each man seemed to prefer to be alone with his thoughts.
One image of anywhere you've been or whatever you've done normally sticks in your mind forever.
Be it of a foreign holiday, _ a special family event, or a sudden tragedy.
For me, I think I will always remember Abu Al Khasib by that pile of now unused ID cards.
If their owners were murdered at the torturous hands of the Mukhabarat, I just hope their families were allowed the final dignity of having their bodies returned so they could be buried.
Sadly, I don't think that is very likely.
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