Jamshidi pours scorn on UNAMA report

KABUL): A senior Afghan prison official on Monday rejected as untrue a United Nations report suggesting police and intelligence men continue to torture and abuse prisoners held in Afghan-run detention facilities.

Based on interviews with hundreds of detainees between October 2011 and October 2012, the 139-page report found “credible and reliable evidence” that more than half of those interviewed experienced torture or abuse, the UN mission said a day earlier.

But Brig. Gen. Amir Mohammad Jamshidi, the general director of prisons, angrily rejected the report as untrue, saying that jail staff was trained through literacy and vocational courses.

“There is no reality in the report,” Jamshidi said of the UNAMA findings that detainees were being subjected to hanging from the ceiling by their wrists, beating with cables and wooden sticks, electric shocks and twisting of their genitals.

Jamshidi said the doors of all prisons under their control were open to the media and the UN.

The UN report also cited instances where Afghan authorities tried to hide mistreatment from UN monitors.

President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman Aimal Faizi said the government perused no policy that allowed torture of prisoners. He promised an investigation into the UN report.  

NATO forces have once again stopped transfers of detainees to Afghan authorities out of concern that they would be tortured.

ma/mud

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