Shiite militias control prisons, official says

Iraq's prison system is overrun with Shiite Muslim militiamen who have freed fellow militia members convicted of major crimes and executed Sunni inmates, the country's deputy justice minister said this week. "We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that," said the deputy minister, Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd. "Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad." Iraqi facilities have drawn increased scrutiny since a US Army raid exposed torture of dozens of detainees–most of them Sunnis–at a secret Interior Ministry facility in the Baghdad neighborhood of Jadriyah. The prison was widely alleged to have been operated by a special police unit staffed largely by members of the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia with ties to Iraq's largest Shiite political party. The government investigated the facility but never announced the results. While a UN human rights report issued last month stressed that the Defense and Interior ministries have legal authority to hold inmates only a brief time, Sunnis charge that members of their sect are regularly imprisoned in the centers for months or even more than a year. In an interview this week, Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie, the top Sunni in Iraq's new government, showed photographs taken from one recent inspection of an Interior Ministry detention center. An inmate in one of the photos held out his misshapen, limp hands for the camera. The man's hands had been broken in a beating, Zobaie said. Other inmates showed massive, dark bruises on their skin; one bore a large, open infected sore. Ninety percent of the men crowded into Interior Ministry detention centers are Sunnis, Zobaie said, calling the treatment in the Interior Ministry prisons "inhumane." On June 10, a group of parliament members paid a surprise visit to a detention facility run by the Interior Ministry in Baquba. "We have found terrible violations of the law," said Mohammed al-Dayni, a Sunni parliament member who said as many as 120 detainees were packed into a 35-by-20-foot cell. "They told us that they've been raped," Dayni said. "Their families were called in and tortured to force the detainees to testify against other people." "The detention facilities of the ministries of Defense and Interior are places for the most brutal human rights abuse," he added.