Three years of torture: smearing his face with human excrement, starving him of food, and withdrawing light and clothing

News: "US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man | By Severin Carrell | 24 April 2005

A British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an attack in which he was blinded.

The Independent on Sunday has been given a detailed account from Omar Deghayes of repeated abuse by American and Pakistani interrogators over the past three years including electric shocks and sodomy by US guards.

The allegations, made by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, have persuaded British ministers to take up Mr Deghayes's case.

In some of the most disturbing allegations to emerge from Guantanamo, Mr Deghayes also accuses US and Pakistani interrogators of beating him repeatedly since his arrest three years ago, smearing his face with human excrement, starving him of food, and withdrawing light and clothing.
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* Members of the US "extreme reaction force" at Guantanamo Bay blinded him in his already weak right eye with Mace riot control gas and by gouging it with a finger;

* At Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, US guards allegedly sodomised five detainees, and forced petrol and benzene into the anuses of others;
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The claims are understood to have shocked the Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons, and played a major part in the Government's decision to directly intervene in the cases of five British residents still held at Guantanamo Bay. Until now, the UK has refused to intervene.
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Mr Deghayes was terrorised by one technique - shoving prisoners into a chamber nicknamed the "snake room". The Libyan claimed: "One day they took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes. The room was painted black and white, with dim lights. They threatened to leave me there, and let the snakes out with me in the room. This really got to me, as these were such sick people that they must have had this room specially made."