An Australian citizen detained without charge in northern Iraq for the past 18 months claims he has been tortured, the government said yesterday after gaining consular access to him for the first time last month.
Ahmed Jamal, 23, had been detained by members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two political parties that control the region, since September 2004 for unexplained security reasons, the Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade said.
Australia has made "extensive senior level representations" to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Iraqi government to find out the legal basis for his detention, a spokeswoman said.
"Mr Jamal told us that he had been tortured immediately following his arrest," the spokeswoman said on the condition of anonymity, following its standard policy. "This is a matter of serious concern to us."
The government did not outline what kind of torture Jamal claims he was subjected to.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said his government was doing everything it could to help Jamal, who is from Sydney.
But Jamal's lawyer Stephen Kenny insisted the government had not done enough.
"The government has only just been to visit him," Kenny said.
"I appreciate it is a dangerous situation in Iraq ... but the government has an obligation to look after the human rights of Australian citizens," he said.
He added that his client had been on a pilgrimage to Mecca and had telephoned his father to say he was staying in the region to look for a Muslim bride.
"I do not know what the allegations against him are at all," Kenny said, who insisted Jamal must either be charged and tried in court or freed and allowed to return to Australia.
The PUK, the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, could not immediately be contacted for comment.
It is the second largest party in Iraq's northern Kurdish region.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS