These are the full-of-freedom words said by the confident detention guard and chief investigator to the civil detainee, Abdel-Hamid Muhammad Jaafar Al-Janadi (50 years old), at Al-Saleh City prison, after a 4-year period of deprivation and physical and psychological torture against him.
Abdel-Hamid was detained from his own home on the evening of August 24, 2016, after 10 military pickup cars full of Ansar Allah (Houthi) group soldiers “Houthis” had surrounded his house in Al-Janad village, Taiziyah district in Taiz Governorate, and shot him in the left thigh, in full view of his family and children. He was forcibly taken to Al-Saleh City, located in Mafraq Mawiyah, north of Taiz, which used by Ansar Allah group to detain dozens of people.
On December 19, 2019, Abdel-Hamid was released, based on a prisoner exchange deal that took place between “Ansar Allah” group on one hand and government forces on the other hand, despite he denied any involvement in any war or armed actions.
Describing his years of detention to Mwatana for Human Rights, Abdel-Hamid says, “In the beginning, I was held alone in a narrow and dark room so-called (Aden Chamber) as it is too hot and carbon-coated. It is full of insects and dirtiness.”
Under this harsh circumstance, his detention lasted for six months, without receiving any sympathy except from the wound in his leg, which began to rot. He says, “You can imagine the length of nights, feelings of suffocation, helplessness and waiting for death.”
According to Abdel-Hamid, there was no latrine in the room, so he resorted to the trick of minimizing his food and drink to one loaf and yoghurt twice a day so that he would not defecate in the same place where he slept.
Abdel-Hamid said that he was psychologically and physically tortured periodically. He was denied of having medications and sedatives, as he confronted that with screaming in pain in the face of his jailers, seeking help to get a sedative that might relieve his pain, but without any response from them.
On the investigation, Abdel-Hamid says that he was interrogated from the night of his arrival at the Al-Saleh Detention center. He was charged with several charges, most notably the identification of location coordinates for the Coalition’s Air-forces, communication with the leaders of Islah Party, and writing against Ansar Allah group on the social media. He also says that the interrogation sessions continued for long hours, during which he was physically tortured with sticks and electricity shocks until he lost consciousness. His jailers used his wounds and the metal nails attached to his leg to torture him with electricity.
Alert searching for a Pen
After two and a half years of detention and enforced disappearance, Abdel-Hamid was able to write a letter to his daughter. It was his first letter to his family since he was detained, which he sent– secretly – with one of the released persons. Abdel-Hamid says that word of the letter reached one of the supervisors of the detention center, setting the apartment, to which he was transferred with approximately 25 detainees, on high alert searching for the pen I used to write that letter. Masked personnel searched every inch of the detainees’ bodies and surroundings. Abdel-Hamid says, “I was running out breath and praying to God they do not find the pen, when one of the armed personnel approached, pulled out, twisted, and sensed every space of my mattress, and found the pen stuck inside the sponge!”
Despite the abuses and affront to dignity he faced, Abdel-Hamid said to Mwatana, “I had great confidence that this agony will end one day.”
After three years, during which he did not see or was not exposed to the sunlight, the management of detention center decided, one month before his release, to take him along with other detainees to the roof of the detention building, so they can see the sunlight after the long period they spent in the dark. “They were moments of freedom that I wished would not end. Yet, they were very short as the jailer took us back to our temporary graves in less than ten minutes.” Abdel-Hamid said.
At the end of 2019, the jailer walked in to tell his victim what he had thought a good deed; collect your stuff and follow me… you are free to go!
Nevertheless, after all these years of arbitrary detention, Abdel-Hamid was not given his full freedom, as the prisoner exchange deal, on the basis of which he was released, has limited his movements and denied him to return to his village and family, as he was transferred to Taiz downtown as a prisoner of war not as an arbitrarily detainee. Just as his long detention without justification represented an indelible psychological scar, the injury in his leg and complications of not receiving health care has brought him an unhealed wound.
This Blog was posted under a cooberation project between Khuyut and Mwatana for Human Rights.
