Dilawar (born c. 1979 – December 10, 2002), also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who was tortured to death by US Army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
He arrived at the prison on December 5, 2002, and was declared dead 5 days later. His death was declared a homicide and was the subject of a major investigation by the US Army of abuses at the prison. It was prosecuted in the Bagram torture and prisoner abuse trials. US award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) focuses on the murder of Dilawar.
Dilawar
Dilawar was a 22-year-old Pashtun taxi driver and farmer from the small village of Yakubi in the Khost Province of Afghanistan. He was tall and weighed . Dilawar was transporting three passengers in his taxi when he was stopped at a checkpoint by Afghan militia and arrested along with his passengers. The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers, who transferred them to the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. Two of his passengers, Abdul Rahim and Zakim Shah, were reported to have suffered treatment similar to that of Dilawar. They survived Bagram and were later flown to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps at the US base in Cuba. At Bagram, Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell, and suspended by his wrists for four days. His arms became dislocated from their sockets, and flapped around limply whenever guards collected him for interrogation. During his detention, Dilawar's legs were beaten to a pulp. They would have had to have been amputated because damage was so severe. He died on December 10, 2002. He is survived by his wife and their daughter, Bibi Rashida.
Arrest
The New York Times reported on May 20, 2005 that:
Torture
The various accounts of torture have been detailed as follows:
A black hood pulled over his head limiting his ability to breathe
Knee strikes to the abdomen
Over 100 peroneal strikes (a nerve behind the kneecap) Shoved against a wall Pulled by his beard His bare feet stepped on Kicks to the groin Chained to the ceiling for extended hours, depriving him of sleep Slammed his chest into a table front
The New York 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 that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
Moazzam Begg claimed that while detained in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, he was partial witness to the torture inflicted upon Dilawar.
Death
The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct.
Leaked internal United States Army documentation in the form of a death certificate dated 12 December 2002, ruled that his death was due to a direct result of assaults and attacks he sustained at the hands of interrogators of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion during his stay at Bagram. The document was signed by Lt. Col. Elizabeth A. Rouse of the U.S. Air Force, a pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC, and listed as its finding that the "mode of death" was "homicide," and not "natural," "accident" or "suicide" and that the cause of death was "blunt-force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease".
A subsequent autopsy revealed that his legs had been "pulpified," and that even if Dilawar had survived, it would have been necessary to amputate his legs.