Desperate search for missing friends, relatives turns up empty

‘‘Maybe they (prisoners) are without food. I’m telling the soldiers for 3-4 days. My colleagues say under this area, there is a tunnel,’’ he said.

Maged is one of hundreds of Iraqis who have dared to start poking into the prisons and police stations of the toppled Iraqi administration, buildings abandoned by security forces just before the US military captured Baghdad. Anxiously, the families venture into deserted jails such as Al Hakemiya, searching cells, examining documents, calling out in hopes of an answer which, in Maged’s case, did not come.

They are people such as Ali Abbatsa, 43, who was jailed and, he says, tortured at Al Hakemiya in October because of a relative’s involvement in anti-government activities.

During his 20-day incarceration, Abbatsa says, he caught a glimpse of the relative in another cell. Today, he was back searching for him. Also, looking was Khalid Issa Ahmed, 40, a taxi driver. He said his brother, a physical therapist, got off the bus near his office in northern Baghdad on December 30 and hasn’t been seen since. Ahmed suspects that his brother, Mawfak Ahmed, 47, could have been detained because of his work several years ago with UN inspectors enforcing the trade embargo.

‘‘It’s four months we are looking for him,’’ Ahmed said. He, too, had heard the rumour of a tunnel beneath the Hakemiya prison. ‘‘There are too many jails,’’ he sighed. ‘‘We need to bring the Marines to search the jails.’’

Western human rights groups say that the government of Saddam Hussein had one of the world’s worst human rights records, with perhaps up to 200,000 people ‘‘disappearing’’ into his secret prisons, based on accounts by Iraqi defectors and others.

The tan concrete complex had been trashed like other government buildings, its picture of Hussein torn down, its halls awash in paper forms, wires, even the cloth ties used to bind prisoners’ hands. Maged, a few friends and five young Marines set to work, plumbing stairwells, poking their flashlights into cells, checking patios.

In one room, Maged started clapping. It was a signal, he said, to the hidden prisoners. ‘‘Maybe they will hear us and say something, yell ‘Help!’’ he said. He went onto a terrace and peered over a flooded patio. ‘‘Aku ahad? (Is anybody there?)’’ he called.

The Marines said their platoon receives three or four requests a day from Iraqis seeking help in finding their vanished relatives. Maged said his neighbour vanished on September 15 after he was summoned by the government passport office. The neighbour had applied for permission to leave the country. ‘‘He came here,’’ said Maged, pointing to the passport office. ‘‘And he didn’t come back.’’ (LAT-WP)