Grisly Discovery Suggests Torture

What happened inside the dank cellar walls of the Mahalla e Muhaxhereve police station here remains unknown.

But when Serbian Interior Ministry police abandoned the building as British troops took control in this provincial capital early this week, this is some of what they left behind: a bed frame with a belt tied to one post; a mattress pocked with bullet holes; heaps of hand-forged brass knuckles; piles of wooden batons, one with the Cyrillic word “mouth shutter” carved in its side; a black ski hat with two eyeholes cut in the fabric; knives of every size; and mounds of heavy metal chains.

And photographs. Dozens of police mug shots of women, young children, and men of all ages, all with sad eyes and most with disheveled hair.

“It’s the photographs of the people and not knowing what happened to them that gets you,” said British Capt. Andy Reeds, who on Thursday led a few reporters through the grisly chambers. “Are these people still alive and walking the streets?”

In the basement’s damp, dark confines are four stark rooms. Dried red stains ran down the walls of one cubicle behind a door of bars.

“We don’t think this place was designed to kill people,” Reeds said. “We think people were arrested, brought here to be interrogated in a manner that might be called torture, and then brought to other places.”

Residents said Thursday that hundreds of people were packed into the building in mid-May. For three days and nights screams of pain and terror came from the multi-story building, forcing many in the neighborhood to retreat to the back rooms of their apartments to block out the sound.

“We could hear the screaming,” said Blerina Ullokoqi, 14, who lives two houses from the police station. “They were yelling, ‘Oh God!’ ‘Mama!’ Things like that.” She said she was so traumatized that she ran to the room on the far side of the house and tried to cover her ears.

Burim Krashniqi, 14, who lives a few houses away, said that during the same period, his father was arrested, interrogated and beaten at the station before his eventual release. British military officials said that since taking control of the station, they have received numerous similar accounts by neighbors and former detainees who have wandered to the site.