6 Foreigners Still Languishing in Taliban Jail

It’s called the Supreme Prison of Kandahar, and it reputedly was the largest in Afghanistan, a place where the former regime sent its enemies and miscreants.

Today, the Taliban is gone, but a section of the prison still holds a handful of sad and lonely men.

They are foreigners who, by dint of circumstances, fell into the hands of Afghanistan’s xenophobic religious zealots. And because of that, they say, they lost months or years of their lives and suffered daily beatings, ruthless torture, starvation and degradation bordering on the inhuman.

One is a trader from Saudi Arabia who was looking to buy cheap goods in Afghanistan but was picked up as a spy. One is a Syrian Kurd who hoped to receive an education in Afghanistan and lost his documents instead. One is a Russian Tatar who says he was trying to take a shortcut from his homeland to the world abroad and entered Taliban territory illegally.

Six foreign inmates were discovered in the prison this week by a journalist who went there to check out reports of the release of 1,600 to 1,800 political prisoners by the new administration of Prime Minister-designate Hamid Karzai. Some of the men were willing to share chilling tales of abuse and mistreatment at the Taliban’s hands.

On Karzai’s orders, most of the political prisoners went joyously free Monday. But in the disarray of the war, the International Committee of the Red Cross is still contacting embassies so that the foreign prisoners can find their way home.

One man, Ayrat Vakhitov, an ethnic Tatar from Naberezhniye Chelny, Tatarstan, in the Russian Federation, said he and a friend crossed into northern Afghanistan two years ago from Termez, Uzbekistan.

They hoped to get to Iran to obtain visas to travel more widely, he said, but were discovered by the Taliban and accused of being Russian agents.

“When they caught me, they beat me a lot,” Vakhitov said. “They beat me eight days in a row. They were asking me, ‘Who sent you?’ ”

During this time, Vakhitov managed to keep in touch with his friend by talking through the prison walls. But one day, all communication ended.

“I think he must have died from being hit with a Kalashnikov” assault rifle, Vakhitov said.

Later, Vakhitov was transferred to a prison in the capital, Kabul, and finally to the one in Kandahar. The beatings continued, he said, along with other forms of torture. For instance, he was allowed only a single thin garment to wear for 1 1/2 years, even though the Kabul prison was icy cold in winter.

In Kandahar, his tormentors tied his wrists together and strung him up for hours. They put his feet in ice-cold water.

Vakhitov rolled up his sleeves to show scars where, he said, the ropes had bitten into his arms.

Worst of all, he said, was not having any hope of release or any chance to contact his family. He was told three times that he had been sentenced to death. There was no possibility of even saying goodbye.

Vakhitov carefully wrote down the name and telephone number of his mother in Naberezhniye Chelny, and The Times called her Thursday to say that he was alive. She sounded overwhelmed and ecstatic. A devout Muslim, she said that she had been fasting and praying for Vakhitov and that God had answered her pleas.

“I have lived for the last two years not knowing where my son was,” said Amina Khasanova, 65. “What I learned today filled my heart with joy. Only a mother can understand how terrible it is not to know where your son is, how horrible it is to get used to the idea that you might never see him again. A mother’s heart aches.” She said the news had “breathed new life into mine.”

Abdul Hakim Mohari, 44, an affluent Saudi trader, said he had traveled to Pakistan in September, looking to buy cheap rugs and other goods to sell in the bazaars of his country, and had gone to Spin Buldak--just across the border in Afghanistan--searching for bargains.

When Taliban police picked him up, they accused him of being an American agent sent to try to kill Osama bin Laden and collect the $5-million reward then on Bin Laden’s head. For three days, he was given no food or water.

On the fourth day, he was offered filthy water and drank it. When he passed urine afterward, he drank that too. And he had to sleep on bare concrete for weeks on end, developing sores that are still open and bleeding. More recently, he was fed one piece of bread a day, he said, and his vision remains blurred from the beatings he endured soon after his arrest. He said that when he was arrested, he was robbed of currency and goods worth $5,000.

“You could not say one word to them,” Mohari, who speaks fluent English, said of his jailers. “Believe me, whenever we heard them entering the courtyard, every one of us was shaking like a leaf.”

The jailers left the prison Dec. 7, the day an agreement was announced to turn over Kandahar to anti-Taliban Pushtun commanders.

For several days, there was confusion, but when Karzai arrived in the city Monday, he announced that political prisoners--mostly captured anti-Taliban fighters from the Northern Alliance--would be freed at once. Criminals who received harsh sentences under the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law, would have their cases reviewed.

The political prisoners were let go en masse and taken to the governor’s palace, where they were each paid 500 Pakistani rupees, about $8, to make their way home.

That left only about 250 common criminals and the six foreigners behind the prison’s thick brick and stone walls, said jailer Tor Jan. (Jan demurred when asked to show the rooms where the Taliban had beaten its captives. “We still are using them, when they break the rules,” he said.)

In any case, good riddance to the Taliban, said Mohari.

“They are not people--they are wild animals,” he said. “They don’t have mercy at all. No, never, never. I don’t believe they are human beings. You know Dracula? Drinking blood? That is them.”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.