U.S. military officials confirmed for the first time that the holy book of Quran was splashed with urine in Guantanamo Bay prison by US troops.
On March 25, a detainee complained to guards that "urine came through an air vent" and splashed on him and his Quran. In another confirmed incident, water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet, and in another confirmed incident a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.
The findings are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba. A Newsweek magazine report that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee's Quran down a toilet triggered the investigation.
Hood said that of nine mishandling cases that were studied in detail by reviewing thousands of pages of written records, five were confirmed.
In one of the unconfirmed cases, a detainee in April 2003 complained to FBI and other interrogators that guards "constantly defile the Quran." The detainee alleged that in one case a female military guard threw a Quran into a bag of wet towels to anger another detainee, and he also alleged that another guard said the Quran belonged in the toilet and that guards were ordered to do these things.
