'It's just evil in here'
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON
TIMES
ZUBAYR, Iraq — Coalition forces have discovered an abandoned military prison here, where discarded gas masks and used atropine injectors suggest the recent presence of chemical weapons and human testing.
U.N. weapons inspectors have no record of the prison, in which at least two
cells appear to have been recently sealed with fresh cement and brickwork.
Several chambers have neatly painted signs saying "chemical storage"
and bright cartoon drawings of gas masks, gloves and boots.
U.S. troops assessed the prison Wednesday while searching a warehouse
containing the remains of several hundred Iraqi and Iranian soldiers. The two
are not presumed to be related.
The prison, just east of the Shiabah Airfield and north of Zubayr in
southeastern Iraq, appears to have been in use until very recently. A roster of
prisoners, discovered inside the compound, lists detainees who were
incarcerated as recently as Jan. 4, 2003.
There was no sign of what happened to the inmates and no indication of what
their crimes were. But the punishment seems to have been severe.
Piles of blankets, clothing and personal items indicate a hasty departure.
There is also evidence of crude torture. Electric cords snake through a tiny
window in one cell, the frayed ends dangling from an anchor in the ceiling.
Similar sets of wires trail into other concrete rooms.
"I'd hate to think of what those clamped onto," said one U.S.
soldier, who speculated the far end would be attached to a generator.
"It's just evil in here."
At least a half-dozen gas masks were scattered near the prison's entrance and
inside one of the wire-enclosed walkways of the white cinder-block prison.
There were also several spent auto-injectors of atropine, a powerful drug that
is administered as an antidote to nerve gas.
Over the last half-decade, U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq have reported
numerous examples of suspected testing of chemical or biological agents on
prisoners.
But U.N. spokesman Ewen Buchanan said in New York that the U.N. inspection
teams know nothing about a facility at Zubayr. "We have no record of
having inspected anything at that location," he said by telephone.
With no Iraqi soldiers or authorities to question, coalition officials said it
was impossible to explain what might have happened inside the prison.
The air base is in an area presently under the command of British forces, who
are rotating command and could not be reached yesterday for comment.
Zubayr is a dismal town just south of Basra, which this week remained darkened
by smoke from oil fires and troubled by looting. There are few two-story
buildings in Zubayr, and the horizon meets the ground in a barely broken gray
line.
The area has not been a fertile farming region since the Baghdad regime began
draining the swamps to starve out and relocate its mostly Shi'ite Marsh Arabs
after the 1991 war. Today, the area is a vast wasteland.
British troops last week located a warehouse filled with badly decomposed
skeletons of more than 400 soldiers presumed to be victims of Iraq's eight-year
war with Iran in the 1980s.
A scan of the identified bodies indicated that most of the dead were Iraqis.
Plastic bags of bones, decomposed human dust and scraps of clothing were laid
in new plywood coffins or stacked in the corner of the sprawling warehouse
inside the disused Shiabah Airfield.