Then the US occupation forces have the nerve to tell the world about how well they are treating POW’s…
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=4/28/03&Cat=2&Num=004
U.S. ‘Blackmailing’ Iran Over Fate of Missing Iranians in Iraq: Official
Iran on Sunday appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) over the fate of its remaining prisoners of war in Iraq as it accused U.S. of intending to “blackmail” the Islamic Republic on the fate of missing Iranians. The appeal came as news emerged that the bodies of 300 Iranian prisoners of war buried by Saddam Hussein’s forces had been found in a mass grave on the edge of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. “Americans’ delay in responding to ICRC over the fate of thousands of missing Iranians on the Iraqi soil is in line with the Baath regime’s policy, amounting to a sort of blackmail,” the Head of the Committee for Searching the Missing in Action Brigadier Mirfeisal Baqerzadeh said here. “America’s move in concealing information on Iraq’s secret prisons and graves and not submitting related documents and evidence to the ICRC for presentation to Iran is a political exploitation,” he added. AFP on Saturday cited Mohammad Ihsan, who handles human rights in the local Arbil-based government of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), as saying that military uniforms and boots had been unearthed which indicated that those buried in the mass grave were Iranian soldiers captured during the Iraqi-imposed war. More than 300 bodies were buried in the grave, it said, adding locals had seen Saddam’s henchmen bury some of the victims in the mass grave near the city between 1989 and 1991.
Such excavations amount to covering the crimes of Saddam’s henchmen and bear heavily on the sentiments of Iranian, Iraqi and Kuwaiti families of victims, the official added. The Islamic Republic has earlier stressed that it considers U.S.-British troops responsible for any threat against Iranian POWs who may still be in Iraqi prisons, IRNA reported. “Considering that Iraqi prisons and detention centers are under the U.S.-British control, they are responsible for the consequences of any threat against Iranian POWs,” Baqerzadeh said earlier this month. The announcement came after British troops said they had found the remains of as many as 200 people in makeshift coffins and plastic bags in an abandoned warehouse near Basra in southern Iraq. Of those, some bearing signs of torture and execution, about 100 were said to be bodies of Iranian soldiers. Tehran says the fate of close to 4,000 Iranian prisoners of war in Iraq still remains unaccounted. Last year, the Geneva-based ICRC said it had supervised the repatriation of more than 97,400 Iranian and Iraqi POWs since the end of the conflict.
