British Reporter Tells of Jailing in Iraq

A British reporter was jailed in Baghdad when the war began, forced to strip and kept in a small cell without food or bathroom facilities, he said in a report published Thursday.

Bruce Cheesman wrote in the Evening Standard that he spent three days in a Baghdad jail, then was held in a hotel until being permitted to cross into Jordan nearly two weeks later.

He said he heard the bombing of Baghdad start at about 2:30 a.m. Jan. 17 and left his hotel to find a telephone to file his report.

Cheesman said an Iraqi soldier grabbed him near the U.S. Embassy and accused him of being an American pilot. Cheesman said he kept repeating sahafi , the Arabic word for journalist, but was taken to the headquarters of the air force command.

Soldiers took his identification, his belt and $2,700 in cash, then forced him to lie on the floor of a storeroom, Cheesman wrote.

The journalist said he was blindfolded and driven to another location, where he was struck around the neck while someone interrogated him in perfect English.

“Then a guard told me this was the very room in which Bazoft was interrogated for the first time,” Cheesman wrote. Iraq accused Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born journalist based in London, of espionage and hanged him on March 15, 1990.

Cheesman said he was blindfolded each time he was moved, and at one point was forced to remove his clothes.