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British Police and Intelligence Officers Sent to Tackle UK-Funded Torturers on West Bank

[Daily Mail-UK] David Rose - The British government is sending police and intelligence officers to the West Bank to try to stop a wave of brutal torture by Palestinian security forces funded by UK taxpayers. Their mission is to set up and train a new "internal affairs" department with sweeping powers to investigate abuse and bring torturers to justice. On Saturday a senior official from the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank and its security agencies, admitted that torture, beatings and extra-judicial killings have been rife for the past two years, with hundreds of torture allegations and at least four murders in custody, the most recent in August. British detectives will also train the Palestinian police and Preventive Security forces in how to question suspects without torturing them. Britain spends £20 million a year funding the forces responsible for the abuse. In the West Bank city of Nablus, Nasser al-Shaer, a former Manchester academic who was deputy prime minister in the short-lived Hamas Palestinian Authority government elected in 2006, said many of those released from detention in recent months were telling the same story - of torture, including beatings, being suspended from the ceiling, and electric shocks.
2009-10-27 06:00:00
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