Briton Tells of Prison Suffering, Turmoil in Iraq : Escape: ‘It’s been quite an adventure,’ Brock Matthews says of his captivity, the allied bombing of Basra and the rebel uprising that freed him.

After 19 years in Kuwait and a career in the military, British citizen Brock Matthews wasn’t ready to run away just because the Iraqi army invaded his adopted home last August.

So as thousands of terrified Western hostages fled on evacuation flights last fall, Matthews carefully sewed his British passport and Kuwaiti army identity cards into an ornate Persian carpet and calmly carried on.

“I didn’t think it would work out this way,” he said Wednesday. “Never, even on my worst enemy, would I wish this.”

The 58-year-old Matthews unexpectedly showed up in ill-fitting stolen clothes Wednesday afternoon on the war-torn Kuwaiti border after 6 1/2 weeks in a pitch-dark Iraqi prison cell and a harrowing escape from Iraq’s growing civil unrest.

In a two-hour interview, he provided the first Western account of the nightly allied bombing around Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city. He also gave the most complete details yet of the six-day-old fundamentalist Islamic uprising that has swept southern Iraq and has plunged parts of Saddam Hussein’s police state into near civil war.

“It’s been quite an adventure,” he said cheerfully in a clipped British accent moments after he reached safety at a U.S. Army checkpoint in Safwan, Iraq. “Quite.”

Matthews, a ruddy-cheeked man with unruly white hair, twinkling eyes and a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache twisted into points, said he was one of 30 British, American, Australian and other Westerners who decided to stay in Kuwait city during the occupation.

“We had a list of names and phone numbers,” he said. “We kept in touch.”

But at 11:30 a.m. on Jan. 17, the day after the U.S.-led allied coalition began bombing Iraq to force Hussein out of Kuwait, three plainclothes Iraqi agents arrived at his fourth-floor apartment.

He showed them a formal-looking letter signed by the Australian consul in Baghdad noting that Matthew’s son is an Australian citizen and implying that he is, too. A British passport, he knew, was dangerous, with British bombers pounding Iraq.

Even worse, the former Indian army colonel worked for the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense, training riders and show horses for the police and army. A military connection could be fatal.

The Iraqis seemed satisfied with Matthews’ fake identity letter and left. But at 3 p.m. they were back. This time they arrested him, saying he needed an Iraqi visa to live in Kuwait since the country had been annexed by Baghdad.

“I said, ‘Let me get some towels, shirts,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘No, come with us.’ Just the clothes on my back. . . . No one knew I’d been arrested.”

For five days, Iraqi secret police agents beat and interrogated him. At one point, an officer fired shots beside his head, while he was blindfolded and had his hands tied behind him.

Another officer then told him in a soothing voice, “It’s OK, don’t worry, you’ll be all right,” Matthews recalled.

“Then when they felt your resistance was down, when you were relaxed, that’s when they’d come and punch you in the kidneys,” he said. “I passed blood for two weeks.”

Dehydrated from the ordeal, he asked his guard for water. “You want water?” the Iraqi replied. “We can urinate on you if you want water.”

His guards toyed with him. “One would say, ‘He’s all right, he’s telling the truth, let him go.’ And just when you think, ‘Thank God that’s the end,’ they come back again. Oh, they’re very shrewd chaps,” Matthews said.

Matthews was told he was destined for Baghdad. Instead he was driven in a van to the Harther Prison, seven miles northwest of Basra, where 3,000 political prisoners were housed. He was the only Westerner.

He was fed a piece of bread and half a tomato a day. He shared his cell with 160 men, unable to walk without stepping over bodies. Worst of all, only candles bought from guards cut the daylong darkness.

“I was there nearly two months and never saw daylight,” he said. “Total darkness.”

At least one man was carried out, dead of dehydration. And each night, the huge prison shook as allied bombers pounded Iraqi military camps surrounding the prison, and destroyed every bridge in the city.

“There was utter panic,” Matthews said. “Everyone was running madly around. People were panicked.”

He and other prisoners followed the war on smuggled radios. He was crushed when he heard that the process of prisoner exchanges after the ground war could take weeks.

“That’s the most depressed I ever got,” he said.

But at 9 a.m. last Saturday, the prisoners suddenly heard mortars boom and automatic weapons fire outside. Suddenly shouts filled the air.

“You are free! You are free!” resistance fighters yelled as they shot locks off the cells.

“There was confusion,” Matthews said. “Some people thought Saddam Hussein had declared a pardon. But it was the resistance.”

The rebels, many of whom carried posters of Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, quickly shot the prison governor and wounded his assistant. And Matthews and his cellmates ran as fast as they could.

“Can you imagine?” he recalls. “We hadn’t seen sunlight in two months. We got outside and couldn’t even see.”

When their eyes adjusted to the light, they were astonished. Rebel troops were burning army barracks and executing government and leaders of the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party.

The city’s police chief had been stood up and shot. Crowds chanted “Death to Saddam!” as army tanks burned. Bodies littered the streets.

“At this point the resistance was totally in control,” he said.

Two days later, the city was in flames as advancing Republican Guard troops fired tank cannons, rockets and artillery into dwindling rebel redoubts, and this time, they were taking no prisoners.

For four days, he hid with Shiite Muslim rebels as the army surrounded the city. He took his first bath and stole a striped jacket, cable-knit sweater, and trousers that were too short from an already ransacked store.

Each day, he and two cellmates, Saad Ramez Hassad, 20, a Lebanese, and Hatheem Inudwen, 27, of Sri Lanka, would scout another escape route, only to be forced back.

Finally, at 8 a.m. Wednesday, a Republican Guard officer let them through. They walked 10 miles, then hitchhiked to the border on an Iraqi pickup truck.

Matthews recounted his tale to The Times on the drive back to his apartment. He shook his head at the burning oil wells and bombed-out Iraqi tanks that lined the roads, victims of Hussein’s ambition.

“It’s devastated,” he said. “Unbelievable.”