The U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski formerly in charge of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told BBC Radio on Saturday she has evidence Israelis were involved in interrogating Iraqi detainees.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s bureau Saturday evening denied the accusations as baseless.
‘These reports have no basis in reality,’ a bureau official said.
Karpinski said she met a man who identified himself as an Israeli during a visit, related to the Abu Ghraib torture affair, to a Baghdad intelligence center.
‘I saw an individual there that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet before, and I asked him what did he do there, was he an interpreter – he was clearly from the Middle East,’ Karpinski told BBC radio in an interview broadcast Saturday.
‘He said, ‘Well I do some of the interrogation here and of course I speak Arabic but I’m not an Arab. I’m from Israel.’ I was really kind of surprised by that… He didn’t elaborate any more than to say he was working with them and there were people from lots of different places that were involved in the operation,’ Karpinski added.
Israel has denied similar reports in the past, including a New Yorker magazine report that Israel was training Kurdish fighters in Iraq.
Karpinski was suspended from command of the U.S. Army’s 800th Military Police Brigade after the publication in April of photos showing soldiers abusing and humiliating naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib.
She has said she did not know about the abuse and is being made a scapegoat in the scandal.
Palestinians repeatedly claimed that Israeli interrogators fingerprints are clear in the used torture techniques in Abu Gharib Prison.
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