Cairo — The torturers followed a schedule.
Beatings on Saturdays, torture on Sundays, and Monday was a break. The next three days were the same routine. On Fridays, it was time for solitary confinement.
From inside a Yemeni prison controlled by the United Arab Emirates — a top US ally — a Yemeni detainee held without charges chronicled torture and sexual abuses through drawings. Smuggled to The Associated Press from the Beir Ahmed prison in the southern city of Aden, the drawings offer a grim glimpse into a hidden world of flagrant human rights abuses by UAE officers acting with impunity.
Sexual violence is a primary tool aimed at brutalizing the detainees and extracting “confessions,” the artist and six other detainees told the AP.
The drawings — made on plastic plates — show a man hanging naked from chains while he is being subjected to electric shocks, another inmate on the floor surrounded by snarling dogs as several people kick him, and graphic depictions of anal rape.
“The worst thing about it is that I wish for death every day and I can’t find it,” the artist said, summing up nearly two years in detention that started last year after he spoke against the Emiratis in public.
The UAE’s secret prisons and widespread torture were exposed by an AP investigation last June. The AP has since identified at least five prisons where security forces use sexual torture to brutalize and break inmates.
During Yemen’s three-year civil war, UAE forces purportedly fighting on behalf of the Yemen government have overtaken wide swaths of territory in southern Yemen and have swept up hundreds of men into a network of at least 18 hidden prisons on suspicion of being al-Qaida militants. The prisoners are held without charges or trials.
Witnesses said Yemeni guards working under the direction of Emirati officers use various methods of sexual torture and humiliation. They rape detainees while filming the assaults. They subject prisoners’ genitals to electric shocks or hang rocks from their testicles. They sexually violate others with wooden and steel poles.
“They strip you naked, then tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then sodomizing starts,” said one 46-year-old man who has been in detention for more than two years and who, like other detainees, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
A former security chief who was involved in torturing to extract confessions told the AP that rape is used as a way to force detainees to cooperate with the Emiratis in spying.