Pilgrimage Ended in Nightmare for Kuwaiti : Human rights: Accused of taking part in a bombing, then jailed, he now says his confession was forced.

Mahmoud Abdullah Kazem traveled to Mecca every year with his brother Ali, the high, sweet tones of his voice as he recited the Koran enchanting pilgrims during Islam’s holy pilgrimage.

A slight, quiet young medical student, Mahmoud, 20, was on his fifth hajj with his brother that day in July, 1989, when Ali disappeared. The next day, the police came for Mahmoud.

Why, the Saudi authorities wanted to know, did the two brothers have pamphlets in their dormitory written by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini? What, they asked, did they know about the bombs that had exploded a few days earlier as pilgrims prepared for the sacred climb of Mt. Arafat?

Two months later, Ali was dead, beheaded with 15 other Kuwaiti pilgrims. Mahmoud was behind bars, sentenced to 15 years and 1,000 lashes for working with members of a Kuwait-based cell of the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah to plant the bombs that killed one pilgrim and injured 16 others.

Now, unexpectedly freed last month under a royal amnesty from the Saudi monarch, Mahmoud says that--after being confronted with four of his friends who had been tortured into making confessions--he was coerced into making a videotaped confession that he helped carry out the bombings.

Saudi authorities contend that there is strong evidence that the two Kazem brothers and at least 18 other defendants carried out the bombings at the bidding of Iranian leaders. Human rights investigators say the truth may never be known, because the evidence has never been made public.

Mahmoud, who in an interview with The Times became the first to fully tell his story, said he and his brother were victims of a law enforcement system that was determined to find who was responsible for the latest in a series of violent incidents that had plagued the annual pilgrimage for years.

If his version is true, his case paints a violent picture of behind-the-scenes justice inside Saudi Arabia, one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East, and it points up the political strife underlying the annual event that is supposed to unify the world’s 1 billion Muslims.

Mahmoud and three co-defendants also pardoned in the case, continuing to proclaim their innocence, say they are waiting for the Kuwaiti government to declare that the Saudis were wrong when they identified the Kuwaitis as the perpetrators of the bombing.

And Mahmoud, at home amid the political turmoil of the liberation of Kuwait, lives in fear that the pardon will go away, that the nightmare of the last two years will rewind and start playing again and the Saudis will change their minds and re-arrest him.

“I still live in terror,” he said. “One might say, ‘Why are you afraid? One who is innocent is never afraid.’ When I went to hajj that year, I was not afraid. But I was accused, I was terrorized, my brother was killed. Why not this tragedy repeat itself?”

There was a quiet sense in the air that July at Mecca. After the turmoil of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, often echoed in fundamentalist violence in the streets of Mecca, there was a sense of relative calm that year as pilgrims began flooding into the holy city. The Kazem brothers had traveled to Mecca with a group of other Kuwaiti Shiites, a sect of Islam that dominates Iran but represents a minority in most of the Arab world.

The bombing itself passed as little more than an interesting rumor among the crowd, Mahmoud recalled, the latest in a series of violent incidents during the hajj.

A few days later, Mahmoud came back to the building he was sharing with other Kuwaiti Shiite pilgrims and found Saudi police there, demanding to be let into a locked room that contained the group’s passports and a bundle of religious pamphlets, written by the Ayatollah Khomeini, on the proper way to perform hajj rituals.

“They said, ‘Is there anybody who can open the door?’ They said, ‘We think Ali can open the door. Where is that man, Ali?’ ” In fact, Ali had been arrested the night before along with Mansour Hassan Mehmeid, a 32-year-old Kuwait city elementary schoolteacher subsequently accused of being the ringleader of the group.

On the night of July 16, six days after the bombings, Mahmoud was awakened from a sound sleep by police. He was held for several hours in a cell at the Mecca police station, then was taken before a man who began asking him not just about the pamphlets but the bombing.

Mahmoud was taken with eight other Kuwaitis to Jidda, and questioned the next night.

“The man said, ‘OK, listen to me, Mahmoud, you have to be a man. Never lie, never try to lie, otherwise I will hang you from the ceiling.’ Then he said, ‘OK, what’s your name?’ I said, ‘Mahmoud.’

‘What’s your age?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Aha! You’ve started to lie!’ And he said to another man in the room, ‘OK, bring that stick.’ It was a big bamboo rod, and he pressed it on my cheek, and he said, ‘Now, tell me the truth.’ I said again, ‘I’m 20.’ ”

A doctor came in, examined his teeth, and said he could be no more than 14. Mahmoud insisted that he was a medical student at Kuwait University, and the doctor, he said, proposed a test, a quiz about some basic medical information, which Mahmoud passed.

Then the man wanted to know where Mahmoud was at the time of the bombing, and he said he was where he always was at that time of day, reciting the Koran after prayers. “He said, ‘Do you have witnesses?’ I said, ‘Yes, lots of witnesses. I recite the holy book in a very beautiful voice, so I guess all the pilgrims remember me.’

“They said, ‘What about your brother?’ I said, ‘I guess he was with me.’ He said, ‘You’re a liar. Your brother has confessed to doing the bombing.’

“I thought he was lying.”

Mahmoud said he was left alone for the next week. Then one night, he was taken to a room with six or seven police officers sitting in a semicircle and was told to sit in the middle.

One of the men, he said, began talking. “He said, ‘OK, Mahmoud, we have enough evidence that you have participated in the bombings in Mecca.’

“He said, ‘We have 20 witnesses; everybody would testify against you.’ I said, ‘OK, go ahead, bring them.’ ”

The authorities led in a man he knew well, Abdullah Assad, one of those who was later executed. “He was terribly tortured,” he recalled. “His dishdasha (robe) was full of patches of blood, he had some scars on his face, his hair was standing up as if it had been pulled. They asked him, ‘Do you know Mahmoud?’ And he nodded. . . . He didn’t say yes, he just nodded. ‘Did he participate with you?’ He nodded again.

“I told him, ‘Abdullah, are you sure you are speaking about me?’ He nodded. The officer said, ‘Go ahead, defend yourself, argue with him.’ ”

Mahmoud said his friend, in an apparent attempt to save him, then replied under his questioning that he was unsure whether Mahmoud had participated.

Adel Bahman, a volunteer who had been working with Ali and Mahmoud during previous pilgrimages, walked in next. Patches of skin were removed from his cheek and forehead, and there were bandages on his hands, Mahmoud said. “All of this performed the task of terrifying me,” he said. But under Mahmoud’s questions, he, too, recanted the information that implicated him.

“I thought it was all over then,” he said. “I remember I smiled and I told the interrogator, ‘OK, what are you going to do?’ He said, ‘What? It’s only two witnesses, and still we have 18 witnesses.’ ”

Abdul Wahab Baroon, another friend, was brought in, with bandages on his legs. He, too, accused Mahmoud, who was finally told by the interrogator, “If there are two doors and one of them is being innocent, forget about that door, you will never be innocent.”

Mahmoud--terrified, exhausted, depressed, hungry and in tears--then decided he would confess only that he had opened a door to a room where he saw men meeting.

But the sessions kept going every night for the next six or seven days, each night until dawn or later. His confessions became progressively more detailed.

On one night, the officers brought in Mehmeid, a man whose videotaped testimony, broadcast on Saudi television, was that he and his associates had picked up the explosives for the bombing from the Iranian Embassy in Kuwait. Mehmeid told the officers that Mahmoud was supposed to have acted as a lookout.

Mahmoud, desperate to find some way of exonerating himself, realized that none of the witnesses had said he was with them when they returned to the dormitory after the bombing. So he told the officers during the next go-round that he had panicked before the actual bombing took place and fled.

Twice Mahmoud appeared before judges and more or less affirmed the accuracy of his confessions, fearful that to deny them would be to lose whatever leniency he might otherwise obtain.

One evening in mid-September, Mahmoud and three others were blindfolded, handcuffed and taken to a prison in Riyadh.

Though the lashings were never carried out, Mahmoud said he was jailed and his family denied access to him. He and the others learned of Kuwait’s invasion when they saw a guard’s television by chance.

After the first day of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, only a few weeks ago, the four men were taken by bus to meet with a senior police official who told them Kuwait was liberated and “You will be set free, (God willing).”

That evening, the four men were taken to the Saudi coastal city of Dammam, and the next morning they were delivered to the Kuwaiti army on the Saudi-Kuwait border. He learned the news about Ali only moments before he returned home.

“For me,” Mahmoud said, “this has changed my life completely. I have become a subject of suspicion. . . . Really, I am living in unrelieved terror.”