Dilawar

Dilawar (born c. 1979 – December 10, 2002), also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who was tortured to death by US Army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.

He arrived at the prison on December 5, 2002, and was declared dead 5 days later.

His death was declared a homicide and was the subject of a major investigation by the US Army of abuses at the prison.

It was prosecuted in the Bagram torture and prisoner abuse trials.

He died on December 10, 2002.

He is survived by his wife and their daughter, Bibi Rashida.

Leaked internal United States Army documentation in the form of a death certificate dated 12 December 2002, ruled that his death was due to a direct result of assaults and attacks he sustained at the hands of interrogators of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion during his stay at Bagram.

The document was signed by Lt. Col. Elizabeth A. Rouse of the U.S. Air Force, a pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC, and listed as its finding that the "mode of death" was "homicide," and not "natural," "accident" or "suicide" and that the cause of death was "blunt-force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease".

A subsequent autopsy revealed that his legs had been "pulpified," and that even if Dilawar had survived, it would have been necessary to amputate his legs.

The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no threat" to American forces."

The various accounts of torture have been detailed as follows:

The New York Times reported that:

"On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. 'Leave him up,' one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time."

Moazzam Begg claimed that while detained in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, he was partial witness to the torture inflicted upon Dilawar.

The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct.

The New York Times reported on May 20, 2005 that:

"Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.

On the day that he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday.

However, he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.

At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi.

On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.

Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint.

They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers.

In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator.

(Mr. Dilawar's family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)

The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack.

Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep.

When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.

In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained.

The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.

US award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) focuses on the murder of Dilawar.

Dilawar was a 22-year-old Pashtun taxi driver and farmer from the small village of Yakubi in the Khost Province of Afghanistan.

He was 5 ft tall and weighed 122 lb. Dilawar was transporting three passengers in his taxi when he was stopped at a checkpoint by Afghan militia and arrested along with his passengers.

The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers, who transferred them to the Bagram Theater Internment Facility.

Two of his passengers, Abdul Rahim and Zakim Shah, were reported to have suffered treatment similar to that of Dilawar.

They survived Bagram and were later flown to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps at the US base in Cuba.

At Bagram, Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell, and suspended by his wrists for four days.

His arms became dislocated from their sockets, and flapped around limply whenever guards collected him for interrogation.

During his detention, Dilawar's legs were beaten to a pulp.

They would have had to have been amputated because damage was so severe.