PESHAWAR, May 25: Badar Zaman Badar, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, has said that the jail authorities stopped mishandling and desecrating the Holy Quran in 2003 following strong protests by prisoners. Talking to Dawn on Sunday, Mr Badar, who was released in September 2004 after spending over two years in camp X-ray, recalled that the prison staff used to mishandle the Holy Quran during daily checking of prisoners’ cells.

Throwing the Holy Book on ground while the prisoner was praying, he added, was a common practice employed by some jail officials deliberately to hurt the inmates’ religious sentiments.

“They used to carry daily checking of the Holy Book in every cell by carelessly turning its pages to check that nothing has been hidden inside it,” said Mr Badar, adding that “on several occasions, US soldiers threw the Holy Quran on the ground”.

Mr Badar, his brothers Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and Hafizur Mohammad, and their friend Abdul Haleem Himmat were picked by personnel of Pakistani security agencies from Academy Town, Peshawar, on Nov 17, 2001, on suspicion of having links with Al Qaeda and Taliban.

While Haleem Himmat and Hafizur Mohammad were freed after 10 days, Badar and Muslim Dost were taken to Guantanamo Bay in May 2002.

The account of their experience during their confinement in Guantanamo Bay prison lend credence to reports of desecration of Holy Quran and abuse of prisoners by jail authorities, a point rejected by the US administration.

The two brothers have several stories of desecration of the Holy Quran and ridiculing the Islamic tenets by jail authorities.

“Mishandling of the Holy book and abuse of inmates was a routine affair in Guantanamo prison until 2003 when jail authorities held out an assurance that they would show respect to the Holy Quran in future and would not touch it during daily checking of prisoners’ cells,” said Mr Badar.

He recalled that once prisoners observed a hunger strike for three days after a soldier had thrown the Holy Quran in a container.

Similarly, he added, jail authorities employed several techniques to mentally torture and provoke the prisoners.

“Prisoners used to be taken for interrogation shortly before prayers, they were disturbed by soldiers while they were offering prayers and to divert prisoners’ attention during prayers security guards used to play music loudly,” said Mr Badar.

During his more than two-and-a-half-year imprisonment, he said his and other prisoners’ beards were forcibly shaved off five times, twice in Guantanamo Bay and on three occasions at the Kandahar detention cell.

He, however, acknowledged that the Guantanamo Bay prison was much better than the detention cells in Peshawar, Bagram and Kandahar.

“In terms of facilities, Guantanamo prison is much better as conditions in Bagram and Kandahar were nothing less than hell,” said Mr Badar, who underwent 150 sessions of interrogation, mostly in Guantanamo where he spent one-and-a-half year in Camp Delta’s camp-I, II and III and about an year in camp-IV of the main camp where prisoners declared ‘white’ by interrogators are kept before being released.