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Recently released
doctor describes torture in Libyan jail

Recently released
doctor describes torture in Libyan jail

The Palestinian doctor who was freed from a Libyan jail this week along with five Bulgarian nurses said his captors tortured him by tying his hands and legs to a metal bar and spinning him like a chicken on a rotisserie.

In an interview broadcast Friday on Dutch television, Ashraf al-Hazouz also said Libyan authorities drugged him, shocked him by attaching electrodes to his feet and genitals, and set dogs on him.

''They asked me how many days it had been since I had eaten. I said four days--I thought they were being compassionate,'' said al-Hazouz, 39. ''They said, 'Roasted chicken,''' he said.

Then they tied his arms and legs to a bar and spun him repeatedly, like a chicken on a rotisserie.

Al-Hazouz, speaking in Arabic on public TV's Ein Vandaag program, with his words translated into Dutch subtitles, said he was forced to sign a statement that he had been well-treated.

He and the nurses were accused in 1999 of deliberately infecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV, 50 of whom later died. The medical workers were sentenced to death based on their confessions but were released into Bulgarian custody on Tuesday after the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. They were immediately granted a presidential pardon in Bulgaria and freed.

The Dutch government has said it expects al-Hazouz, after recuperating in Bulgaria where has been granted citizenship, will move to the Netherlands, where his father and four sisters were given political asylum in 2005.

Al-Hazouz said the prisoners moved cells frequently at the beginning. One cell was so hot, ''I peeled the skin from my forehead like this,'' he said, moving his fingers over his brow. The cell was ''like a sauna because of our breath. There was no ventilation.''

He said he was attacked by dogs three times.

In the end, he said, ''I gave the answers they wanted.''

Libyan authorities in Tripoli were unavailable to comment on his allegations.

In 2005 the six medics filed lawsuits against 10 Libyan officers alleging torture, but the charges were rejected by a Libyan court.

The day the medical workers were released, the director of a fund created to compensate families of infected children expressed disappointment over the court ruling.

''We believe that acquitting the Libyan officers on charges of torture was incorrect, but this is a court decision and we respect the Libyan judiciary,'' said Saleh Abdul-Salam, director of the Gadhafi International Foundation for Charity Associations, which manages the fund headed by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's son, Seif al Islam.

Al-Hazouz and two of the nurses, Nasya Nenova and Kristiana Valcheva, have said they were ready to testify in a Bulgarian investigation launched in January about their torture allegations.

Bulgarian prosecutor Nikolai Kokinov said the Libyan officers were suspected of using coercion, torture, and threats between February and May 1999 to extract false confessions from the six. (AP)

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