page_title: Bagram torture and prisoner abuse
section_title: Dilawar
hierarchical_section_title: Bagram torture and prisoner abuse / Victims / Dilawar
caption_attribution_description: English: A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was allegedly chained to the ceiling of his cell. Image obtained from: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/05/19/international/abuse.184.1.450.jpg en:nl:Afbeelding:Bagram prisoner abuse.184.1.450.jpg
context_page_description: In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army investigatory report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Bagram, Afghanistan and general treatment of prisoners. The two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged in 2005.
context_section_description: Dilawar, who died on December 10, 2002, was a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver and farmer who weighed 122 pounds and was described by his interpreters as neither violent nor aggressive.
  When beaten, he repeatedly cried "Allah!" The outcry appears to have amused U.S. military personnel. The act of striking him in order to provoke a scream of "Allah!" eventually "became a kind of running joke," according to one of the MPs. "People kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,'" he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."
  The 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 a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
  In the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney, there was a claim that Dilawar was captured while driving through militia territory, not going past Bagram air base. The militia stopped him at a roadblock and transferred him to the U.S. Army for a monetary reward, claiming he was a terrorist.
caption: A sketch showing how Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell by Thomas V. Curtis, a former sergeant in the Reserve United States Army Military Police Corps
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