Threads Unravel in Iraqi's Tale Story of Husband's Execution Contradicted by Relatives Who Say He Is Alive
By Peter Finn Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page A18
An Iraqi woman who was granted refugee status in the United States after telling The Washington Post and U.S. officials that she had been imprisoned, tortured and sexually assaulted in Iraq during the 1990s appears to have made false claims about her past, according to a fresh examination of her statements.
Jumana Michael Hanna also claimed that her husband, Haitam Jamil Anwar, had been executed during the rule of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Her testimony led to the arrest of several Iraqi security officials. Based on her testimony, U.S. officials took her into protective custody in Baghdad and then to the United States.
She was the subject of a lengthy article in The Post in July 2003. Later, a writer who was interested in collaborating with Hanna on a book concluded that she was not telling the truth. The writer's article appears in the January issue of Esquire magazine.
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After she was taken into U.S. protective custody in 2003, Hanna identified a number of Iraqis, including a brigadier general, as among those who participated in torture at the jail. Based on her testimony, a number of Iraqis were subsequently arrested by U.S. and Iraqi security forces. They were all released after Hanna was flown to the United States and the case languished, officials said.
Donald Campbell, a New Jersey superior court judge who oversaw the case in Baghdad as one of the American advisers to the Iraqi judicial system, said Hanna had convinced investigators and other Iraqi and American officials in Baghdad that she was telling the truth. He noted, however, that an Iraqi doctor had examined her for evidence of past torture and rape and did not believe her. The doctor's opinion was dismissed, he said. The Post was unable to independently verify or refute her allegations of abuse.
"She was interviewed many times over many months and she was always consistent," Campbell said in a telephone interview from New Jersey. "I recall asking, 'Is she telling the truth?' The investigators told me that there was no way she could make this up."
U.S. officials also said before The Post article was published in 2003 that they found her credible.
After arriving in California, where she was first resettled, Hanna met Sara Solovitch, the author of the Esquire article, and the two agreed to work on a book about her experiences. However, her claims began to become more and more outlandish, and Solovitch began to doubt her, according to the Esquire piece.
Hanna told Solovitch, for instance, that she attended Oxford University in Britain, although she could speak very little English; she had told The Post that she had taken business courses in Baghdad. She told Esquire that she had a bizarre, direct encounter with Uday Hussein, although she had told The Post that she never saw or heard him. She also told Esquire that other female prisoners were killed in a gruesome fashion. In interviews with The Post, she spoke of beatings and rapes of female prisoners, but not of killings.
"I went into this project anticipating that I would be working with a genuine hero," Solovitch said in an e-mail to this reporter. "Now, I believe that she is at best a pathological liar, at worst a highly intelligent con artist. Jumana took advantage of all of us."
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22249-2005Jan19.html
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