The "nightmare" started with his arrest and incarceration in a secret prison without any form of trial, the ex-detainee, Mohamed Chrif said in a statement Saturday to Italian weekly, "Tempi".

    The Polisario jailers acts in the same way as the Khmer Rouge, and practice the same interrogation techniques "during torture sessions to compel detainees to confess imaginary crimes written down in reports they are forced to sign," Mohamed Chrif, explained, noting that his family was not informed about his arrest and did not even dare ask about his whereabouts "for fear of retaliation."

    "They hang me from the ceiling handcuffed for hours. Next to me, other detainees were hung by the legs, head down. Many times, we were forced to kneel down on sharp pieces of zinc," he said in reportage by Tempi's special envoy to the southern provinces, Rodolfo Casadéi.

    Among the forms of torture used in Tindouf, was "attaching the detainees to a table and beating them one after another with metal cables.  They would spit on them and leave them in that position for a couple of days," he went on to say.

    Mohamed Chrif said he ended up surrendering and "fabricating a story which went along with the accusations made against him", to end up the torture circle.

    Tempi's reportage presented several accounts according to which several detainees died under torture in the prisons of the +Polisario+, notably Abdelaziz Haidala, a friend of Charif, who was a journalist in the radio of the separatists.

     Charif recalled having seen his friend Haidala for the last time in the office of a security official: “he shouted of pain, and a few days later, I was informed of his death.”

     According to the Italian paper, Mohamed Chrif is one case among many other Sahrawis with whom the +polisario+ used “Stalin-like methods” after arresting them for “betrayal”, an accusation that serves as a cover for “political repression.”

      Charif who spent five years in a cage-like prison cell in a total isolation, expressed will to bring justice for his friends who died under torture in the prisons of the camps of Tindouf.

     After his release, he joined the +Polisario+  again, but as he had the chance to go to Spain, he chose to stay  in Europe before joining  the southern city of Dakhla.

     Mohamemd Charif underlined that the settlement of the artificial Sahara conflict lies in Morocco’s autonomy proposal under the Moroccan sovereignty, adding that “there is no need to create a microscopic state run by a bunch of criminals who killed my friends.”

     “What remained from the +polisario+ are scattered groups of interest” made up of people who “became rich thanks to arms and drug trafficking,” he added.

     “What I hope for the most now is to see all the families reuniting after they were split by the +Polisario+, and all the Sahrawis, who still live in the camps of Tindouf, coming back to their motherland, Morocco,” he concluded.

Source: MAP
News and evenst on Western Sahara issue/ Corcas