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I February 2015
WORLD NEWS I 19
HRW says Egypt not serious about improving prison conditions
Human Rights Watch accused Egyptian authorities of failing to take serious steps to improve conditions in overcrowded prisons which are causing deaths. The government denied the accusations.
The New York-based group said it had documented nine deaths in custody since mid-2013, when the army’s ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi was followed by a crackdown on his supporters. Human Rights Watch said
authorities “are taking no serious steps” to deal with the issue. The group said some detainees appeared to have died after torture or physical abuse while “many appear to have died because they were held in severely overcrowded cells or did not receive adequate medical care for serious ailments”. Citing interviews with relatives and lawyers, it called the conditions many detainees faced “lifethreatening” and detailed the deaths of five men from beating and lack of medical care. Interior Ministry spokesman Hany Abdel Latif said “such talk has no basis in truth.” “This is very strange talk and hasn’t been said anywhere else before,” he added. Reuters
Former child Gitmo Muslims burnt to detainee going blind death in According to a report by Intercept, the lawyer for Omar Khadr who was blinded in the left eye after an attack in Afghanistan, where he was captured, is now losing his eyesight in his remaining eye and can no longer be able to read or see clearly. Khadr was told by a doctor that he has a cataract due to a “foreign object,” which appears to be most like a piece of shrapnel from the firefight, she said. “Initially he was having trouble reading because there was a light flashing and he could not focus,” Zinck said, as she prepared to visit Khadr. “Now he can’t see through that cloudiness to be able to do any more than look at small pieces of text for a short period of time.” News of Khadr’s failing eyesight came on the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada on whether it will consider his case. The Canadian government asked the high court to review an Alberta Court of Appeals decision that condemned
Ottawa for not treating Khadr as a youth once he was transferred to Canada from Guantanamo. Following his capture in 2002, Khadr was held for several months at Bagram Airbase before being transferred to Guantanamo. At both sites he was subjected to torture, including sexual humiliation, shackling in stress positions, and sleep deprivation, according to his lawyer. In one 2003 incident, he is alleged to have been dragged through a mixture of pine oil and urine by his interrogators and denied a change of clothing for two days thereafter. In 2010, Khadr entered into a plea bargain with the Guantanamo military commission, admitting to throwing a grenade which killed a U.S. Army combat medic during the deadly raid that led to Khadr’s capture. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, not including time served, and was allowed to complete his sentence in a Canadian prison.
north India
Police in India’s eastern state of Bihar have arrested eight people in connection with the deaths of three Muslims who were reportedly burnt to death, according to local media. Violence erupted in the predominantly Muslim village of Azizpur, in the district of Muzaffarpur when angry villagers torched more than a dozen huts belonging to Muslims, reported local daily The Hindu. The attack was reportedly sparked by the discovery of the dead body of a 19-year old Hindu youth, who had been missing for more than a week after an alleged love affair with a Muslim girl. Most of the villagers ran away fearing backlash. The state government has announced a compensation of $8,100 for each of the families of those killed in the violence.