An Iraqi official said his cousin went to the embassy in Washington, DC, to renew her visa in the 1990s, but refused to go inside at first for fear that she would never come out alive.
To lend comfort and support, two relatives accompanied her to the consulate, located approximately two miles from the White House. “She’s crying because she has to go in and deal with this.
“My father and uncle can’t go in. So they sit there outside saying, ‘OK, you have to go in, we’re going to be right here, we’re going to be sitting right here,'” the official said.
His cousin — a student at the University of Virginia at the time — was lucky enough to make it out of the embassy without a scratch.
“This was the game under Saddam,” the official warned. “You never know what could happen to you when you walked into one of our embassies — even here in the US.”
The Post exclusively reported Wednesday that Saddam installed a jail equipped for torture inside the Iraqi Mission in Manhattan during his oppressive reign from 1979 to 2003, when his regime was toppled by US forces.
His savage spies — known as the Mukhabarat — were put in charge of the “detention room” in the basement, where they imprisoned local Iraqis for up to 15 days sometimes to force their relatives back in the homeland to surrender and cooperate with the tyrannical government, two Iraqi officials said.
The secret chamber was similar to detention rooms in Iraqi embassies in Eastern Europe, where evidence of torture was uncovered, the officials said.
Some of the torture tools used by the Mukhabarat included wooden planks, rubber hoses and copper wires. The agents also pulled out prisoners’ nails and beat them to a bloody pulp.