KABUL — A year after Afghan authorities promised to stop torturing political prisoners, they continue to hang them by their wrists and beat them with cables or sticks, the UN charged yesterday in a new report.
Not only has there been scant progress in curbing such abuse, but Afghan authorities have also repeatedly tried to hide the mistreatment from UN monitors, the report says.
As a result, NATO is again blocking the transfer of many detainees to Afghan control, the report adds, citing such forms of torture as twisting prisoners’ genitals and anal rapes using bottles.
In a letter responding to the report, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government said its own investigation had found “the allegations of torture of detainees [to be] untrue and thus disproved.”
If there is any torture in the detention facilities, it is nowhere near the levels described in the report, government officials wrote.