Freed Doctor Describes Torture Ordeal Inside Libyan Jail

The Palestinian doctor who was held in Libyan custody along with five Bulgarian nurses on charges they infected hundreds of children with HIV, has described in detail how they were tortured during their eight-year ordeal. Ashraf Alhajouj, 38, said he was beaten, held in cages with police dogs and given electric shocks, including to his private parts. He said that he and the nurses were sometimes put together naked in the same room and tortured.

In a harrowing first-person account, published in the latest edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel following the release of the six last week, Dr Alhajouj described how following his initial arrest in January 1999, along with the nurses, he was taken to a police dog training center outside Tripoli.

"For the first days I was locked up with three dogs who were ordered to attack me. My leg is full of scars and marks from where they bit me [and] I had a big hole in my knee," he said.

Later, he said, wire cable that had been stripped of its plastic coating, was wound round his penis and he was dragged "screaming and crying" across the floor. He was also given electric shocks with a generator-style machine.

"They put the minus cable on my finger and the plus cable on my ear or my genitals. The most painful thing was their ability to increase the speed of the electricity flow. When I fell unconscious they would throw cold water over my naked body and then begin all over again," he said. The torture times were set for between 5pm and 5am and continued for 13 months. The nurses were submitted to similar treatment.

"Sometimes we were tortured in the same room. I saw them half-naked, they saw me completely naked when I was being electrocuted. We heard each others' whimpering, crying and screaming." He said he saw the women being raped and watched as one of them broke a piece of glass from the window and cut her wrists when she could not bear it any longer.

Dr Alhajouj, who is temporarily living in Bulgaria, denies the charges that he and the nurses infected 426 Libyan children with HIV. He described the hygiene conditions at Bengasi hospital, where he went to work in 1998, as "catastrophic".

"We had no needles, the sterilization apparatus was broken and there was only one pair of scissors to cut the umbilical cord of a dozen newborns". He said he planned to sue his torturers.