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[casi] Evidence Contradicts Rumors of Torture



http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/international/worldspecial/07BODI.html

A MAKESHIFT MORGUE
Evidence Contradicts Rumors of Torture
By JUDITH MILLER


ZUBAYR, Iraq, April 6 — A poignant bit of unfinished history caught up with
the current campaign against Saddam Hussein today, as American and British
officials combed through a makeshift morgue for Iraqi and Iranian soldiers
killed in the 1980's in a war most Iraqis are too young to remember.
The 664 thin wooden coffins at the morgue, containing the remains of 408 men,
were stacked in neat rows, some five coffins high in a warehouse in what the
officials called a former Iraqi artillery complex. A bone occasionally
protruded from one of the plastic bags in the coffins containing all that
remained of a young soldier — an identity tag, a wallet, a piece of uniform
soaked in blood turned brown with age, pictures of loved ones, and
occasionally some money.
Investigators from the United States 75th Exploitation Task Force arrived
here this morning from their camp in northern Kuwait. The task force, charged
with documenting war crimes, had come to investigate what initial
descriptions of the site suggested was a center for torture and execution.
But in just a few hours, Chief Warrant Officer Dan Walters, the leader of the
task force's Criminal Investigation Division unit, said a preliminary
examination of the remains and some of the thousands of pages of documents
that were abandoned in a building next to the warehouse suggested that
atrocities had probably not occurred here. Rather, he said, Iraqis had
apparently been processing the remains and preparing to exchange them with
Iran.
"Their wounds were consistent with combat deaths, not executions," said Mr.
Walters, whose team is supported by the 75th Field Artillery Brigade,
normally based in Fort Sill, Okla. "So far," he added, "there are no
indications that war crimes were committed here."
An estimated million people were killed in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, which
Mr. Hussein initiated against the fledgling Iranian Islamic government, his
first war as president. The conflict ended in an uneasy truce. But Iraq
claimed victory in the war, which nearly bankrupted the government and paved
the way for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It was in the war with Iran that
Mr. Hussein ordered the use of poison gas against enemy forces for the first
time, as he did against Iraqi Kurds. But members of the forensic team
examining the remains said they had found no trace of chemicals or biological
agents on or near the remains.
Iran had seconded the Iraqi government's assertion that the site had been
used to process and exchange prisoner of war remains from the war. Brig. Gen.
Mirfeisal Baqerzadeh, the head of Iran's search and recovery committee of
those missing in action, had said that the bodies were found in recent months
in joint recovery operations in Iran and southern Iraq, but that the exchange
had not taken place because of the American-led invasion.
Some early news reports by correspondents traveling with the British forces
who stumbled on the site on Saturday suggested that it had been used for
torture.
But Capt. Thomas D. Jagielski, who is leading the war crimes team known as
"mobile exploitation team delta," or MET Delta, said the suspected "torture
chambers" described in some reports were apparently makeshift offices
separated by hastily erected mud-brick partitions. Here, Iraqis had
apparently documented the identities of the dead.
About 85 percent of the dead were Iraqis, Mr. Walters said. The rest are
believed to be Iranian. The men are believed to have been killed sometime in
the mid-1980's. But MET Delta members said they had asked the Army's
Institute of Pathology, in Washington, to send out a forensic anthropologist
to help determine the exact time and manner of their deaths.
Mr. Walters said efforts would be made in the coming days and weeks to return
the remains to the families of the Iranians and Iraqis.

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