10 Sunnis Suffocate in Iraqi Police Custody

By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: July 13, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 12 - Iraq's widely feared police commandos were struggling on Tuesday to explain how at least 10 Sunni Arab men and youths, one only 17, suffocated after a commando unit seized them from a hospital emergency ward and locked them in a police van in summer temperatures exceeding 110 degrees.

As relatives collected the bodies from Baghdad's main morgue and drove them to a village near Abu Ghraib for burial, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr was meeting with two police generals who run the commando units, preparing for a government statement that Mr. Jabr's office said would be made Wednesday.

One of the officers, Brig. Gen. Rashid Flaieh, acknowledged in a telephone interview that the victims suffocated inside what he described as 'an armored van.' But he denied accounts by one survivor that the victims had been kept in the van for more than 12 hours, saying it was 'only two hours.' He also rejected assertions by doctors who examined the bodies that the victims, in addition to suffocation, had been subjected to torture with electric shocks.

'The van had an air-conditioning system,' he said, 'but they had a problem with it, and it was the lack of oxygen that caused the deaths.'"