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Iraqi shoe-thrower was badly beaten in jail, says his brother

BAGHDAD: The television reporter who threw his shoes at United States President George Bush was burned by a cigarette in the hours after his arrest on December 14 and beaten so badly by Iraqi security personnel that one of his teeth was knocked out, the reporter’s brother said on Sunday after a visit to the jail.

The reporter, Muntader al-Zaidi, 29, has been in jail since hurling his shoes at Mr. Bush during a news conference here last week. Al-Zaidi has not been formally charged, but he faces up to seven years in prison if convicted of the crime of aggression against a foreign leader during an official visit.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki did not return phone calls seeking comment on Sunday about the allegations, but the al-Maliki government has previously denied that al-Zaidi had been mistreated while in custody.

It was Mr. al-Maliki’s security detail that detained al-Zaidi immediately after he hurled his shoes at the President. Mr. al-Zaidi was seen being beaten before he was pulled from the room where the joint news conference by Mr. Bush and Mr. al-Maliki was held.

On Sunday, several hours before the torture allegations were made public, Mr. al-Maliki said that he had received a letter from Mr. al-Zaidi saying that a terrorist had persuaded him to throw his shoes at Mr. Bush.

“He revealed in a letter that a person urged him to commit this act, and this person is known to us as a person who beheads people,” Mr. al-Maliki said, without divulging the person’s name. Mr. al-Zaidi’s family has maintained that he was acting out of his own frustration with the American invasion.

The visit by one of Mr. al-Zaidi’s brothers was the first by either a relative or a lawyer that the reporter had been allowed since being jailed.

During an interview broadcast on Sunday on Al Baghdadia, the Cairo-based satellite television network for which Mr. al-Zaidi works, Uday, 33, said that his brother was stripped to his underwear before being placed in a cell and tortured during the 24-hour period after his arrest.

“He told me he was sleeping on the floor of the cell when a very large man came in and dumped cold water on him and began hitting him with a thick cable,” Mr. Uday al-Zaidi said in the television interview.

He said his brother had told him that he was brutally beaten by several men and burned on his right ear by a cigarette. Mr. Uday al-Zaidi said his brother had bruises on his face, stitches on the bridge of his nose and swelling in his legs, arms and hands. — New York Times News Service

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