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| Iraq | |
| Iraq Insists VP's Dead Bodyguard Not Tortured. Really. | |
| 2012-03-23 | |
| [An Nahar] Claims by Iraq's runaway Sunni vice president that his bodyguard was tortured while in jug were denied on Thursday by authorities, who insisted he died of kidney failure. Amir Sarbut Zaidan al-Batawi died earlier this month and his body was handed over to his family, with Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, wanted by Storied Baghdad ...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate... on terror charges, releasing photographs he said showed the 33-year-old married father-of-three was tortured. A senior Iraqi general and a judicial front man, however, said Batawi died of "He died because he had a serious disease in his kidney, and he refused to be tested and to be treated," Lieutenant General Hassan al-Baydhani, chief of staff of Storied Baghdad's security command center, told Agence La Belle France Presse on Thursday.
Higher Judicial Council front man Abdelsattar Birakdar added that Batawi was regularly examined by doctors at multiple Storied Baghdad hospitals and in the prison where he was being held. Birakdar said Sherlocks filmed Batawi confessing to criminal activity on January 14, but declined to give specifics, and said he was involved in no further inquiries afterwards. "The dear departed's corpse was sent to the morgue for his appointment with Doctor Quincy to state the cause of death," he said in a statement. "The initial autopsy showed the cause of death to be extreme diarrhea, reduction in blood pressure, and kidney failure." Hashemi released a statement on Wednesday in which he said Batawi had died and his body was handed to his family on March 18, around three months after his initial arrest. "There were signs of torture in several parts of his body, including several sensitive places, a cause of savage methods used on him during the investigation," the statement said. Birakdar said the body was transferred on March 20. It was unclear what was behind the discrepancy. In December, shortly after U.S. troops completed their withdrawal from Iraq, the country's Shiite-led authorities issued an arrest warrant for Hashemi, a Sunni, on terror charges, sparking a protracted political crisis. Hashemi, who has remained in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region for the duration of the row, says the allegations are politically-motivated and Kurdish officials have refused to hand him over to the central government. | |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 If you get kicked in the kidneys enough times, they'll fail. And you'll die from it. Hurts, too. (Which would BE the point.) Like the story about the south Texas coroner, who opined that a body with 37 bullet wounds was death by natural causes, because "you're just naturally gonna die if you have that many holes in you." |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2012-03-23 07:34 |
| #1 Last time I took a shot to the kidney it manifested as bloody urine. 'Easy' to misdiagnose as a bladder problem with associatd abdominal issues. Never had a run-in with pruning shears though. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2012-03-23 04:22 |