Kidnapped, beaten, and drugged
Posted by Richard on September 20, 2005
A suicide bomber captured in Baghdad claimed he was kidnapped, beaten, drugged, and forced to undertake his mission to blow up a Shiite mosque. He fled the mosque without blowing himself up and was quickly captured:
Mohammed Ali, who claimed to be Saudi-born and appeared to be in his 20s, said he managed to flee after another suicide attacker set off his bomb, killing at least 12 worshippers Friday as they left a mosque in the northern city of Tuz Khormato.
In confession broadcast on state television later that day, Ali told Iraqi interrogators he did not want to bomb the mosque and hoped to go home.
Results from medical tests on Ali were "consistent with his story and characterization of his treatment," Col. Billy J. Buckner, a U.S. military spokesman said Sunday.
Ali said insurgents kidnapped him from a field near his home earlier this month, then drugged and beat him.
Hat tip to McQ at QandO, who noted wryly:
Seems to me when you have to kidnap your recruits for homicide bombing out of the fields of another country, and drug and beat him to do your bidding that perhaps things are getting a touch desperate.
Yep. Although this sort of thing has been going on for some time. Back on June 20, I posted about Colorado’s Col. Jim West, who told the story of one suicide car bomber who seemed less than enthusiastic (emphasis added):
"He was trying to drive into a busy checkpoint and the Marine guards wounded him and disabled his car before he could reach the intersection and activate the bomb," West wrote. "When they opened the door to remove him, they found him chained to the seat with his hands taped to the steering wheel. He had an activation switch on his body that he could use but they also found a remote-control activation device under the front seat. It was hidden in the floor of the car so he probably didn’t know it was there… He was going to die whether he wanted to or not."
A guard activated a radio-jamming device immediately so the bomb couldn’t be detonated, West wrote.
The driver was "yelling and very agitated and had a glazed look," West said in a telephone interview. It turned out he also was heavily drugged, West said.
A few days later, commenting on an AP story about suicide bombers, I recounted this incident, correcting AP:
The AP story does add breadth and detail to the story of foreign suicide bombers. Of course, some of the details aren’t presented as accurately as one might wish:
There have been a few exceptions.
On election day Jan. 30, a mentally handicapped Iraqi boy, wearing a suicide vest, attacked a polling station.
The poor kid didn’t "attack" a polling station. The jihadists strapped explosives on him and made him start walking toward the polling station. The kid didn’t know what was happening, but he became confused or scared and turned around. Started walking back where he came from.
They remotely detonated him.
Attacked a polling station, my ass.
Leave a Comment