A shocking videotape that shows a wealthy prince from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) brutally torturing a man in the desert has brought a sharp focus on Western dealings with the oil-rich Gulf state.
The man at the center of the 45-minute tape, which shows bloodcurdling scenes of abuse and was smuggled out of the country in secret, is Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a half-brother of the owner of Manchester City Football Club.
He is shown attacking a helpless Afghan merchant he accuses of cheating him on a business deal. He fires guns at him, inserts a cattle prod in his anus, sets fire to his testicles and runs him over.
The tape was first obtained by the ABC News TV channel and broadcast last week. The tape is so gruesome that it is bound to cause ructions across the world because of Issa’s network of family connections, many of them friendly with Western firms, universities and politicians, and the fact that he has not been punished for the attack.
Issa is the brother of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy head of the UAE armed forces. He is also the half-brother of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who last year spent £210 million (US$308 million) buying a 90 percent stake in Manchester City. Mansour is a key political figure and is a member of the UAE federal Cabinet and minister of presidential affairs.
The tape is a terrible blow to the human rights image of the UAE, which for decades has been portraying itself as a Western-friendly country ripe for trade and investment.
US congressman James McGovern has already called for a freeze on government aid to the UAE. He also wants Issa to be refused US visas.
In a letter to the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he said: “I cannot describe the horror and revulsion I felt when witnessing what is on this video ... I could not watch it without constantly flinching.”
The video is especially shocking because it also shows a man in police uniform helping to tie up the victim and hold him down in the middle of the desert. At the start of the torture session, which is believed to have happened sometime before 2005, Issa stuffs sand in the victim’s mouth and fires a machine gun into the sand around him as the man screams helplessly. At one point, Issa tells the cameraman to get a close-up.
“Get closer. Get closer. Get closer. Let his suffering show,” the sheikh says.
Later the sheikh beats the man with a wooden plank with a nail protruding from it, and pours salt in the bloody wounds left by his blows. He also inserts an electric cattle prod in the man’s anus and turns it on, and pours lighter fluid over the man’s testicles, which he then sets alight. Finally, the man is held down in the sand and a Mercedes is driven over him. The sound of bones breaking can be clearly heard.
The victim, an Afghan grain merchant called Mohammed Shah Poor, apparently survived the experience, because the government later justified taking no action against the sheikh by saying the matter had been settled privately between the two men and each had agreed not to press charges against the other.
Another of Issa’s brothers is the interior minister. Despite one policeman helping to carry out the torture, part of the UAE government’s statement on the matter said: “All rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the police department.”
The tape was smuggled out of the UAE by US citizen and Houston businessman Bassam Nabulsi, a former business partner of Issa. Nabulsi said he himself was tortured in the UAE after refusing to hand over the videotapes after falling out with the sheikh.
Nabulsi said Issa ordered Nabulsi’s brother to record the torture scene in order to watch it later at his own leisure. Nabulsi is now suing in the US for the alleged mistreatment he received.
But the story does not end there. Nabulsi credits US embassy staff with keeping him alive while in prison, but he also says he brought the existence of the torture tape — and the collusion of the police — to the US’s attention to little effect, including to a US official assigned to train UAE police.
McGovern has called on Clinton to investigate this side of the story and discover when US officials knew about the tape, if they took any action and, if not, why not.
He urged Clinton and all relevant US officials to watch the tape in its entirety.
“It shocks the conscience,” he said.
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