Hellhole jail where cells are stained with blood

ABU Dhabi’s main jail is a ‘concentration camp’ hellhole where inmates are tortured in bloodstained cells, according to former prisoners.

British businessman David Haigh, who spent two years locked up in Al Wathba prison for fraud, said: ‘It was horror, basically.’ He said yesterday: ‘There was beatings, torture, abuse – you would hear people from other cells being raped.’

Mr Haigh was denied access to his lawyer and rarely able to find a working phone, he told the BBC. Al Wathba, built in 1982 on the edge of the desert, houses 5,000 inmates in stifling conditions with temperatures sometimes rising to 50C. It is not known where Matthew Hedges will be held but the tiny emirate has only three jails.

Recalling the ‘unimaginable stench and squalor,’ British former Al Wathba inmate Johnny de Domenico revealed in a 2010 interview how his cell contained four beds and 32 inmates. There was constant noise and he slept on a sliver of filthy foam on the floor, he said adding: ‘Neither were there any toilet facilities – you just went in the corner, unable even to take your trousers down because your legs were shackled.’

Mr de Domenico, who spent ten months in the hellhole prison, recalled: ‘There was no daylight, constant danger of disease from flea and lice infections.

‘There were also random and inexplicable punishments: when I first arrived at Al Wathba, I was hung upside down from the ceiling in a dark room, for what was probably a matter of hours, but felt like days.

‘Sometimes people left and never came back. You don’t know where they’ve gone to, but you hear about the executions’. He added: ‘Al Wathba is not a prison, it’s like a concentration camp.’

Mr de Domenico also spent part of his sentence in an adjacent facility, Al Sadr, which was ‘hellish, a grim concrete building covered with blood and faeces’. He said: ‘When I arrived with some other prisoners, the guards came out and peed on our bags.’