Torture in Iraq: ‘I did not recognize him because of the torture’

Amnesty International
28 June 2013

"The torture had so disfigured him that even his own mother had trouble recognizing him when she visited him in prison.
But as Ahmad ‘Amr ‘Abd al-Qadir Muhammad’s mother explained, what happened to her son behind bars is not unusual in Iraq.
"For a year I thought he was dead and then I was told that he was in prison. On my first visit I did not recognize him because of the marks of torture on him … The burn on his shoulder, the burn on his leg, the injury from a drill in his arm,” she told Amnesty International.
Her son Ahmad, a Palestinian born in Iraq, was arrested on 21 July 2006 in the Zayouna district of Baghdad, at the height of the sectarian violence that crippled the country, and held incommunicado for more than a year.
The authorities accused him of being a member of an armed group that was planning to plant explosives, and sentenced him to death 17 May 2011 after a trial marred by torture allegations.
When he saw his mother for the first time in a year, in a detention centre in the al-Baladiyat district of Baghdad, he just said:
“They tortured me to force me to ‘confess’.”

A medical examination carried out by the Forensic Medical Institute around two years after Ahmad’s arrest documented “brown large scars” on various parts of his body, congruent with his account......."