TIMESONLINE: The brief film is deeply disturbing, even in a country famed for its al-Qaeda beheading videos and sniper snuff movies. The young woman, evidently drugged, vomiting and occasionally calling for her mother, tries weakly to stop the grinning man in a white T-shirt and boxer shorts from pulling off her underwear.
She fails. The man, instructing the cameraman to shoot the scene with his mobile phone from various angles, rapes her.
That is not the only shocking aspect of the film, according to Jassim al-Bidawi, former Mayor of Fallujah and now a human rights activist. He has identified the rapist as an Iraqi police officer, and says that the cameraman is one, too. They are thought to have drugged the woman as she visited her husband in a detention centre in Ramadi. Since the rapist's uncle is a senior policeman in the city the attacker is all but untouchable, Mr al-Bidawi says.
In the desperate rush to drag Iraq back from civil war, sweeping powers were granted to its new security forces. Human rights workers, MPs and American officials now believe that they are all too often a law unto themselves: admired when they defeat terrorists but also feared for their widespread abuse of power.
In this vast and largely unaccountable security apparatus, with almost a million people in uniform, corruption is rife. One of the most common ploys is to arrest innocent people and then charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for them to be released. >>> James Hider in Fallujah | Friday, April 24, 2009
