Some mishandling of Koran: US probe

Hood’s comments were the most detailed account to date of allegations that military guards and interrogators at the prison had mishandled Islam’s Holy Book. The investigation has not been completed.

Pentagon officials said international furor over an allegation published in Newsweek that a guard had flushed a Koran down a toilet prompted them to brief reporters about the interim findings.

The magazine report about the treatment of the Koran was widely blamed for causing deadly riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Newsweek retracted the report one week after publishing it.

An FBI report released on Wednesday as part of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to shed light on US treatment of the prisoners in Cuba summarised one detainee’s account of the incident in two interviews conducted in July 2002. The guards ‘‘flushed a Koran in the toilet,’’ the detainee alleged, according to the FBI report. ‘‘The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things.’’

That account differed from what the detainee told military investigators, Hood said. He said the prisoner was never asked about the incident cited in the FBI document. But he was asked, the general said, whether ‘‘he had seen the Koran defiled, desecrated or mishandled, and he allowed as how he hadn’t, but he had heard guard—that guards at some other point in time had done this.’’

‘‘I do not believe they used that word, ‘toilet,’ ’’ Hood said. He said he could not explain why the detainee had told different stories to investigators from the military and the FBI, but he indicated that the wording might have been inexact.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said investigative accounts often amount to ‘‘second- and third-hand reports of hearsay’’. Hood refused to give any details regarding the two people he said were punished in two of the incidents.

The Pentagon is conducting a separate internal investigation of reported abuses at the Guantanamo detention facility, led by Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt. The administration has refused to say what that inquiry has found so far. —LAT-WP