Death
The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct.
Leaked internal United States Army documentation, a death certificate dated 12 December 2002, ruled that his death was due to a direct result of assaults and attacks he sustained at the hands of interrogators of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion during his stay at Bagram. The document was signed by Lt. Col. Elizabeth A. Rouse of the U.S. Air Force, a pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC, and listed as its finding that the "mode of death" was "homicide," and not "natural," "accident" and "suicide" and that the cause of death was "blunt-force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease".
A subsequent autopsy revealed that his legs had been "pulpified," and that even if Dilawar had survived, it would have been necessary to amputate his legs.
According to the death certificate shown in the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, the box marked Homicide had been checked as the ultimate cause of death. however, the military had so far publicly claimed that Dilawar had died from natural causes. It was only by accident that the death certificate was leaked, when New York Times reporter named Carlotta Gall managed to track down Dilawar's family in Yakubi, where Dilawar's brother, Shahpoor, showed her a folded paper, he had received with Dilawar's body. He could not read because it was in English. It was the death certificate.
Read more about this topic: Dilawar (torture Victim)
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“It is better to sit down than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is the best of all.”
—Indian proverb, quoted in Sébastien-roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, vol. 1, no. 155 (1796, trans. 1926)
“Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.””
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)