http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/01/MNGE5CI9MO1.DTLSan Francisco Chronicle
Don Van Natta Jr., New York Times
Sunday, May 1, 2005
Growing evidence U.S. sending prisoners to torture capital
Despite bad record on human rights, Uzbekistan is ally
Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.
The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly: "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."
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Now there is increasing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.
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Specific cases have been documented. In the summer of 2002, Amnesty International reported, Fatima Mukhadirova, a 62-year-old Tashkent shopkeeper, was sentenced to six years of hard labor after denouncing the Uzbekistan government for the death of her son, Muzafar Avozov, in a Tashkent prison.
An independent examination of photographs of the body, conducted by the University of Glasgow, showed that Avozov died after being immersed in boiling water, human rights groups reported.
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