A shocking videotape showing a wealthy prince from the United Arab Emirates brutally torturing a man in the desert has brought a sharp focus on western dealings with the oil-rich Gulf state…
The video is especially shocking because it also shows a man in police uniform helping to tie up the victim and hold him down in the middle of the desert. At the start of the torture session, which is believed to have happened some time before 2005, Issa stuffs sand in the victim’s mouth and fires a machine gun into the sand around him as the man screams helplessly.
At one point, Issa tells the cameraman to get a close-up. “Get closer. Get closer. Get closer. Let his suffering show,” the sheikh says.
Later the sheikh beats the man with a wooden plank with a nail protruding from it, and pours salt in the bloody wounds left by his blows. He also inserts an electric cattle prod in the man’s anus and turns it on, and pours lighter fluid over the man’s testicles, which he then sets alight. Finally, the man is held down in the sand and a Mercedes is driven over him. The sound of bones breaking can be clearly heard.
The victim, an Afghan grain merchant called Mohammed Shah Poor, apparently survived the experience, because the government later justified taking no action against the sheikh by saying the matter had been settled privately between the two men and each had agreed not to press charges against the other.
