By Dan Williams
Tel Aviv - A former Lebanese militia chief told a court on Tuesday he had been forcibly sodomised by Israeli secret service torturers who then left him shackled and soaking in excrement for almost two weeks.
Mustafa Dirani said he was too ashamed to repeat the words of his tormentors and instead spelt them out to the court hearing his claim for six million shekels (about $1,34-million or R7-million) in compensation over his 1994 interrogation.
Dirani's testimony was brought forward to Tuesday because he is due to return to Lebanon in two days in a prisoner exchange between Israel and the Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah. Dirani was captured in south Lebanon in 1994 by Israelis seeking information on missing airman Ron Arad.
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'The pain was indescribable' Dirani described his alleged sodomy by a soldier at the orders of an intelligence officer codenamed "George", and another incident in which he said a police baton was inserted into his rectum.
"The pain was indescribable," said the bearded Dirani, wearing a brown boiler suit. "He put it in and I thought I was going to die. I screamed out to God and then he took it out."
Dirani spent most of the next two weeks shackled and wearing adult nappies that left him soaking in urine and excrement, he said in testimony translated from Arabic into Hebrew.
Dirani quoted the officer leading the interrogation as telling him "they were going to S-C-R-E-W me". He said he was embarrassed to say what had been done to him, explaining that "in our community we don't use such words".
Israeli prosecutor Shammai Becker said Dirani's accusations "have no basis whatsoever," and said he was making the claims to justify to his countrymen the information he divulged to Israel after being captured.
'I screamed out to God and then he took it out' Dirani's now defunct Amal militia captured Arad in 1986 and Israel says Dirani handed the airman to the Iranians.
Dirani said on Tuesday he had only told the Israelis he had witnessed Arad's transfer to Iran under duress.
Dirani said that Arad had spent the first night in captivity at his home in Lebanon. But he said he was not involved in taking the airman to his final destination and did not know what it was.
"They wanted to know how they transferred Ron Arad by car, but I did not see. I wasn't there. They wanted details I did not have," Dirani said.
Under the swap with Hizbollah, Israel is to free 436 prisoners, most of them Palestinians, in return for an Israeli businessman kidnapped more than three years ago and three Israeli prisoners, now presumed dead.
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