US Muslim: I Was Tortured at FBI's Behest in UAE
The Associated Press
American Muslim blames the FBI, saying he was tortured at their behest in United Arab Emirates
AP
Yonas Fikre, a Portland, Oregon Muslim American talks to media at his lawyer's office in Stockholm, Sweden, April 18, 2012. After a 2010 trip to visit family in Khartoum, Sudan, Fikre claims to have been detained and tortured. Put on a FBI no-fly list, Fikre is now unable to return home to the U.S. (AP Photo / Claudio Bresciani)
By MALIN RISING and STEVEN DUBOIS Associated Press
4/18/12, 1:15 PM EDT
A Muslim American seeking asylum in Sweden claimed Wednesday he was detained at the U.S. government's request while in the United Arab Emirates last summer, tortured in custody and interrogated about the activities of a Portland, Oregon, mosque.
Yonas Fikre told a news conference Wednesday that he was held for 106 days and was beaten, threatened with death and kept in solitary confinement in a frigid cell.
The 33-year-old, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Eritrea, says he had attended the same mosque in Portland as a man who has been charged in a plot to detonate a bomb in the northwestern U.S. city. He moved to
Sudan in 2009 and later to the United Arab Emirates. He went to Sweden, where he has relatives, after being released from detention on Sept. 15.
Fikre, who converted to Islam in 2003, is the third Muslim man from Portland to publicly say he was detained while traveling abroad and questioned about Portland's Masjid-as-Sabr mosque. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali American who is awaiting trial on a charge of plotting to set off a bomb in downtown Portland in November 2010, occasionally worshipped there. A decade ago, seven Muslims with ties to the mosque were arrested following a failed effort to enter Afghanistan and fight U.S. forces.
Fikre says he met Mohamud a handful of times, but wouldn't call him a friend or even an acquaintance.
Fikre says he was arrested on June 1 in the United Arab Emirates and taken to a prison in Abu Dhabi, where he was questioned about
Evidence of torture used in Iraq | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics : "The Foreign Office says the 'government, including its intelligence and security agencies, never use torture for any purpose' ( MI5 and MI6 to be sued for first time over torture, September 12). The evidence in the public domain from the court martial into the death of Baha Mousa and the serious abuse of 10 other Iraqi civilians is clear in establishing this is not true. UK armed forces went into Iraq with a written policy that allowed hooding, and with a policy of training interrogators to use hooding, stressing and sleep deprivation to gain intelligence. Iraqi civilians were routinely hooded in up to three sandbags - and even old plastic cement bags. When Baha Mousa died in September 2003, partly as a result of abuse while hooded, common sense dictates that at least at that point those in positions of responsibility within the civil service and military would have acted to change the poli...
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