11-year-old boy was among Abu Ghraib prisoners
A boy no older than 11 years old was among the children held by the US army at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the former US commander of the facility told a general investigating abuses at the prison.
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski did not say what happened to the boy or why he was imprisoned, according to a transcript of her interview with Major General George Fay released by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The transcript of the May 2004 interview was among hundreds of pages of documents about Iraq prisoner abuses the group made public after getting them under the Freedom of Information Act.
Karpinski, who was in charge of Abu Ghraib from July to November 2003, said she often visited the prison’s youngest inmates. One boy “looked like he was eight-years-old,” Karpinski said.
“He told me he was almost 12,” Karpinski said. “He told me his brother was there with him, but he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother. He was crying.”
Military officials have acknowledged that some juvenile prisoners had been held at Abu Ghraib, a massive prison built by Saddam Hussein’s government outside Baghdad. But the transcript is the first documented evidence of a child no older than 11 being held prisoner.
Military officials have said that no juvenile prisoners were subject to the abuses captured in photographs from Abu Ghraib. But some of the men shown being stripped naked and humiliated had been accused of raping a 14-year-old prisoner.
The new documents offer rare details about the children whom the US military has held in Iraq.
