Busy hangman perfects his art at Camp Five

IN the chaos and violence of post-Saddam Iraq, the hangman’s art has become a precision science.

Behind the walls of Camp Five, the maximum security Baghdad jail that houses death row, one of the last walks that condemned inmates make is to a room with scales and a height measure.

The figures are then checked against wall charts that say which length the rope should be in the nearby gallows — too short a drop and the convict may dangle in unnecessary agony; too long and they may be decapitated, as happened in some early cases.

With the soaring number of executions in Iraq, it must be hoped that its hangmen have perfected their technique. About 1 400 people are on death row, and at least 132 people have been executed this year.

In a country still plagued by terrorism, the government insists that executions are a necessary deterrent. Every few months, the justice ministry announces another large batch — 42 in October alone — under a section on its website that features a picture of a large noose.

Human rights groups and a former Iraqi judge have alleged that many death row inmates are there on flimsy evidence or because of confessions extracted by torture. Far from curbing Iraq’s terrorism problem, they say it is making it worse, pointing out that this has been the bloodiest year since 2008.

“It does seem like there is a clear correlation between executions being announced and a spike in suicide and car bombings,” said Erin Evers, Human Rights Watch’s Iraq analyst. “They seem to be a provocation rather than a deterrent.”

Among the death row cases taken up by Amnesty International is that of Mahmoud Omar Abdelkadr, arrested during a police shoot-out in 2006 on suspicion of being a bombmaker. His mother, who asked not to be named, claims he was simply caught up in crossfire while he was out shopping. That mattered little after he signed a confession, allegedly extracted under duress by the Wolf Brigade, a notoriously tough unit of the Iraqi police.

“They poured boiling tea on his left shoulder and then rubbed salt into it,” she said. “Then they punctured his hand and knee with a drill.”

Abdelkadr’s mother visits him every two months, but she has no idea which visit will be the last.

The Iraqi government does not publicise the exact mechanics of the execution procedure, but human rights researchers who have been allowed access to death row have been told that when a batch of prisoners are brought out of their cells for execution, they can see those ahead of them in the queue

They poured boiling tea on his left shoulder and rubbed salt into it. They punctured his hand and knee

being executed.

Just how many inmates are genuinely innocent is open to debate. One former US army officer, who helped to revamp the Iraqi judicial process between 2003 and 2010, said the Iraqi police were fairly savvy about who they arrested. He said it was a different story with cases dealt with by the Ministry of Interior, which the US had less control over.

“They were the guys with the knuckle dusters and lead pipes,” he said.

Iraq’s new Shia-dominated government seems unfazed by comparisons with Saddam’s regime. Sami al-Askary, an MP and adviser to the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, said victims’ families often accused it of not being tough enough.

But Abdelkadr’s mother lives in fear of the day the hangman takes her son’s final measurements. — ©