BAGHDAD, March 26: American soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners at a military base in Mosul but nobody was court martialed over the abuse, US army documents say. The documents show that mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners was not confined to the Abu Ghraib jail, where abuse and sexual humiliation of inmates caused worldwide outrage last year. An investigation by a US official after an Iraqi prisoner’s jaw was broken at the base in Mosul found that “detainees were being systematically and intentionally mistreated” in late 2003. Inmates were hit with water bottles, forced to do exhausting physical exercises until they collapsed, deprived of sleep and subjected to deafening noise, the investigation report found. One prisoner died in Dec 2003 after four days of repeatedly having to do physical exercises as a punishment, according to the documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Mosul investigation began after 20-year-old Salah Salih Jassim had his jaw broken in detention. He was not suspected of any crime but had been arrested along with his father, an officer in Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen militia.

“All night they were throwing water on us and making us stand and squat. From the night to the next day ... they were beating us,” Salah Jassim said in testimony to investigators.

The investigation report said Jassim was held in a detention room with around 70 other prisoners. Deafening heavy metal music was played, and guards threw cold water onto hooded prisoners and sounded bullhorns beside their heads.

“It smelled bad. I saw one guy banging his head against the wall, all on his own,” one of the US guards testified. Another said several guards had lost their voices from yelling.

“The guards in the room were roaming among the detainees pounding on metal doors, shouting at the detainees to perform exercises, and physically grabbing detainees if they were slow getting to their feet,” the report said.

“The detainees had sandbags over their heads that were marked with different crimes, leading the guards to believe that the particular detainee committed that particular crime.”—Reuters