BY JULIET O'NEILL, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE APRIL 14, 2010 4:02 PM- — The Canadian official who found tools of torture in an Afghan prison in late 2007 says he reported evidence of abuse of eight other Canadian-transferred detainees in the subsequent 10 months.
Nicholas Gosselin testified Wednesday at the Military Police Complaints Commission whose lawyers made an immediate request to government counsel for copies of reports on the eight cases.
Those eight cases are in addition to eight earlier complaints of prisoner abuse received by Canadian civilian personnel monitoring Canadian captives transferred to Afghan custody between May 3, 2007, and Nov. 5, 2007.
Gosselin, then a human rights officer with Foreign Affairs in Afghanistan, was the key figure in an infamous Nov. 5, 2007, detention centre "site visit" that spurred the deputy commander of the Canadian mission in Kandahar to immediately suspend detainee transfers. Transfers were resumed in February, about three months later.
Gosselin said the Nov. 5, 2007, site visit was special because "it was the first" for him in the then new role of a designated person to monitor and report on detainees under a transfer agreement reached between Canada and Afghanistan the previous May.
He recounted how a detainee showed him and his colleagues a scar on his hip, described how he had been beaten by interrogators from the Afghan Directorate of Security and showed them a braided electrical cable and rubber pipe under a chair in the room in which they were interviewing him.
The frequency of Canadian follow-up visits to Afghan prisons and detention centres was stepped up to a visit every two days for two months and then on average of at least twice a week from January-August, when his posting ended.
He said detainees were interviewed during most but not all of the visits but he was not allowed, for reasons of government secrecy, to say how many detainees he interviewed face to face. "I can't say in a public forum," he testified.
The number of detainees transferred by Canadian forces has also been censored from documents before the commission although diplomat Richard Colvin testified Tuesday that it was "in the three digits" — meaning at least 100 — at that time.
The Military Police Complaints Commission is hearing a complaint by Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association alleging Canadian military police "aided and abetted" torture by transferring prisoners to the Afghan police and security service.
