‘Thinning out’ of prison population

On October 20, 2002, the Iraqi government announced a pardon for all prisoners. The amnesty was intended to thank the Iraqi people for their support of Saddam, who claimed a 100-percent ´yes´ vote in the presidential referendum held on October 15. Iraqi television showed men leaving a prison carrying their belongings in plastic shopping bags and chanting: ``We sacrifice our blood and souls for Saddam.´´However Iraqi human rights activists denounced the amnesty as a farce and numerous voices were raised demanding to know the fate of thousands of Fayli Kurds, estimated between 7,000 to 10,000, who were swallowed up by the prison system. Kuwait accused Iraq of withholding information concerning over 600 Kuwaitis and citizens of other countries who disappeared during the 1991 Gulf War. The Iraqi regime also periodically activates prison ´cleansing´ campaigns that consist of dealing with overpopulation through the execution of hundreds of prisoners at a time. The first prison ´cleansing´ campaign took place in 1984: around 4,000 people were executed in the Abu Ghraib prison. Two days a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, were set aside for such executions that continued throughout the 1990s under the supervision of Qusay Hussein. Between 1993 and 1998 around 3,000 people were eliminated in Mahjar prison, whereas at Abu Ghraib an estimated 2,500 prisoners were executed between 1997 and 1999.Ra´id Qadir Agha, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, told a Kurdish newspaper that on the day after the assassination attempt on Uday Hussein´s life, in December 1996, around 2000 prisoners were executed in one night in the Baghdad prison where had been jailed. A special guillotine that could decapitate twelve people at a time was used on that occasion. According to a former captain of the secret Iraqi police, Khaled Sajed Al-Janabi, who fled to Jordan in June 1999, around 2000 people were executed at the Abu Ghraib prison in one day, March 21, 1998, starting at 6.00 a.m. Prisoners were taken in groups to be shot by firing squads in various indoor parts of the prison. Other inmates were taken to a special ´hanging room´. In another savage elimination of prisoners by the regime, in November 2001, Qusay Hussein supervised the execution of 15 people by lethal gas. They were gathered in a chamber and the gas was released through taps. At least 128 prisoners were executed in Abu Ghraib prison in 2001. Mass executions were also reported in 2002. US Secretary of State Colin Powell, denouncing the atrocities committed under Saddam Hussein and the presence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction to the UN Security Council on February 7, 2003 said that Iraqi scientists had tested chemical and bacteriological weapons directly on prisoners, 1,600 of whom had been transferred from death row to an apposite experimentation unit.