CAT/C/29/D/193/2001
page 4
Once we arrived in Madrid, they made me walk, but my leg was no longer working and
every time I tried, I fell down. They continued to beat me because of that, forcing me to
try again each time I was on the ground, until they saw that I could no longer walk and
they led me to the cells. There they told me they were leaving me for a moment so that
my blood circulation could return to normal.
A little later, they came and forced me to get up, still with my eyes blindfolded. From
then on, they began to beat my ankle, slapped me, hit me on the nape of the neck and
made all kinds of threats. After a time, I can’t say how many hours, they took me to
casualty to have my ankle injury examined. Once I was there, I was diagnosed with a
sprain, they put a bandage on me and advised me to put ice on it to relieve the pain and
keep my foot raised.
When the Civil Guards took me back to the Civil Guard station, they beat me again,
causing a further injury, and pushed me and hit me so much on the injured foot that they
broke my big toe.
They subjected me to a long session of questioning, including beatings, pulling out tufts
of my beard and using an object which gave me electric shocks in the penis, the stomach
and the chest. And as if that wasn’t enough, they used another method - the plastic bag.
This involved putting a plastic bag over my head, tightening it round my neck and
suffocating me. They did this several times, together with the electric shocks. Each time
I passed out, they left me alone for a while to recover, then they started again.
After all of that, they took me to casualty, a different place from before, because the
journey was much shorter, I guessed it must be close to the police station. During the
journey, they constantly threatened me, telling me: “You don’t know where we are
taking you”, “You’re going to the hills to dig your own grave” […].
When we got back, they continued to threaten me. This time, they mentioned my sister:
if I didn’t talk, they would go and fetch her and she would pay because of me - it was up
to me […].
Then they started to make threats against my partner Maite PEDROSA (arrested at the
same time as I was), that they were going to rape her, that she was in a very bad way,
[…] with threats like: “we are filling the bath”. And that if I continued to show off [sic],
they would give me the bath treatment. The beatings never stopped during the time I
spent in the police station, especially blows to my sprained ankle, and beatings and slaps
to the head.
At the end, they told me that they were taking me to the National High Court to make a
statement and that in the afternoon I would have to go back with them to look at some
photos, and that the treatment would therefore depend on what I said in my statement in
court.