Shiite Militias Control Prisons, Official Says

Jonathan Finer and Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post Foreign Service

Iraq's prison system is overrun with Shiite Muslim militiamen who have freed fellow militia members convicted of major crimes and executed Sunni Arab inmates, the country's deputy justice minister said in an interview this week. "We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that," said the deputy minister, Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd. "Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad."(...) In an interview this week, Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie, the top Sunni Arab in Iraq's new government, showed photographs taken from one recent inspection of an Interior Ministry detention center. An inmate in one of the photos held out his misshapen, limp hands for the camera. The man's hands had been broken in a beating, Zobaie said. Other inmates showed massive, dark bruises on their skin; one bore a large, open infected sore (...) Ninety percent of the men crowded into Interior Ministry detention centers are Sunni Arabs, Zobaie said...

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