Freed Inmate Tells of Mass Executions at Iraqi Prison

Ammar Shehab Dein shudders at the memory of the “meals” served up at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

A “meal” is what guards there called the Iraqi prison’s periodic mass executions. “We have a meal tomorrow,” they would taunt the terrified inmates.

During the last 20 days in December, said Shehab Dein, there were at least three “meals” in his section alone. Each time, an officer would stand in front of the two-story cellblock and read off the names of those who were to die.

The doomed men would then have their hands tied behind their backs and be led away--crying, shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and, in some cases, cursing the name of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Later, other inmates would be ordered into the execution chamber to clean up.

As it was described to Shehab Dein, the chamber was “primitive,” ropes suspended over 12 wells. Bound prisoners would be put into a noose and then pushed to their deaths, he said. Doctors were present mainly to determine if the prisoners were dead.

Shehab Dein, a 27-year-old Jordanian trader who was imprisoned last year, is not only a rare survivor of the Iraqi leader’s death row. In interviews with The Times, he is also the first released inmate of Abu Ghraib prison to publicly corroborate and add detail to accounts that emerged at the end of 1997 of a series of executions of hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners and common criminals in Iraq.

At the time, U.S. State Department spokesman James Foley called the reports of mass execution “horrific” and said they would constitute “a gross violation of human rights” if true.

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Shehab Dein’s statements were supported by a second released inmate, a 31-year-old Jordanian businessman who said he was badly tortured shortly after his 1995 arrest and that he fears being identified by name.

“The last weeks before Ramadan, we heard [that] about 500 people were killed. . . . We used to hear them [executions] every day,” the businessman said.

Both men were interviewed in Amman days after their Jan. 21 release in a surprise amnesty, announced by Hussein, for all Jordanian prisoners. (Hussein declared a further amnesty Thursday for all nationals of other Arab countries, apparently in a goodwill gesture hours after he met with the secretary-general of the Arab League.)

According to Iraqi opposition sources in Jordan, Britain and the United States, Hussein’s regime executed 800 to 1,200 inmates at the Abu Ghraib and the Radwaniyah prisons, both near Baghdad, in a cleaning out that began Nov. 20 and lasted into December.

After the State Department raised the issue Jan. 1, the Iraqi Information Ministry angrily denied the accusations, calling them another example of the “hostile propaganda” of Iraq’s opponents.

With the world focused on Iraq’s standoff with the United States and the United Nations over access to disputed sites by arms inspectors, the allegations have elicited relatively little attention.

But the experiences of the two Jordanians, who went to Iraq voluntarily for business and say they once were sympathetic to Hussein, nevertheless are a reminder of the unpredictable brutality inside Iraq.

“If I had a choice between dying and going back to Iraq, I would prefer to die,” said the businessman, who declined to discuss details of his torture except to say: “Execution was something I wanted.”

Since mid-December, opposition groups have been circulating accounts of the executions, which they said were ordered Nov. 19 by Hussein’s powerful younger son, Qusai, and underscore his preeminent role in the spheres of “security and repression,” in the words of one opposition newsletter.

The Iraqi National Congress, a U.S.-backed anti-Hussein group, has compiled lists identifying 160 of the victims.

It said one brother of an executed Iraqi Kurd had to comb through 12 cold-storage rooms containing 30 bodies apiece before he was able to find his sibling and claim the remains. The opposition Iraqi Communist Party, meanwhile, said that 109 of its followers apparently were killed in one day.

Decreed at a time when Iraq appeared to have driven a wedge between the United States and other U.N. Security Council members, the executions may have been ordered to celebrate this diplomatic “triumph on the part of Saddam Hussein,” speculated the Iraqi Broadcast Corp., the opposition’s radio station in northern Iraq.

Neither Shehab Dein nor the businessman actually saw any hangings, but both stated without hesitation that hundreds of their fellow inmates died.

Shehab Dein’s younger brother, Jihad, said that when he visited his brother in prison in December, he saw other families collapse in sobs and wails upon learning that loved ones had been executed. He was once told that he should leave the prison because a round of executions was about to take place, he said.

Shehab Dein, who lived with his family in Iraq for most of the past six years, was arrested Sept. 9 and sent to Abu Ghraib on Dec. 10 after being condemned to death for allegedly buying up cheap construction equipment in Iraq to be dismantled and smuggled out for sale abroad.

Although Shehab Dein and his five brothers buy and sell heavy machinery, he denies being a smuggler and blames his arrest on a false accusation from a business rival who stood to get a significant chunk of Shehab Dein’s assets as a reward from the Iraqi regime.

As soon as he arrived at Abu Ghraib after three months in a cell in Baghdad’s Public Security Department, Shehab Dein said, he was told by fellow inmates about the mass executions that had been taking place.

“Between November and December, they used to take 50 people, 80 people a day,” he said. “It was not something normal.”

From Dec. 10 until Dec. 30, when executions were stopped in observance of the start of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, Shehab Dein said, he saw or heard a total of 56 men dragged away--27, 15 and 14 at a time.

None ever returned to his section, which housed more than 1,000 people who had been sentenced to death for various crimes, ranging from corruption to theft to murder.

He said he believes that prisoners from other sections, including political prisoners and those containing people sentenced to long prison terms but not death, were being executed daily. Among those killed, he said, was a friend he had made earlier at the Public Security Department cells, a likable would-be counterfeiter whom he knew as “Eyad the Palestinian.”

Eyad’s name was among those called out one morning, and he was led out with his hands tied behind his back.

“They allowed him to say goodbye to his friends,” Shehab Dein said quietly. “Eyad came to me right away because I was the only other Palestinian. He said, ‘Forgive me if I have done anything wrong, and give charity in my name if you have the chance.’

“I cannot describe to you the feeling--someone saying that to you. What I thought was, how dear he was to me, and I was helpless to give him any consolation,” he said.

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Shehab Dein said prison conditions were appalling.

He was in a 5-foot-square cell with three other condemned men. They took turns sleeping. But that was “paradise” compared with other cells of the same dimensions packed with seven or eight prisoners.

He said he was sentenced to die based on a confession he never made and upon the written testimony of two “witnesses” whom he had never met and who were not even present at his trial.

Iraq executed four Jordanian students Dec. 9 for smuggling, despite repeated entreaties from Jordan’s King Hussein that they be spared.

Shehab Dein, who had been condemned Dec. 7, said he believed that he surely would be the next to die. But he got a reprieve when Saddam Hussein suddenly ordered all Jordanians in his prison let go, apparently to mollify Jordanian anger.

“I thought I was dead,” Shehab Dein murmured, recalling the moment he learned that he would escape the noose. “But I was reborn.”