When intelligence officers from the Ministry of Information called to say they had her son, she immediately went to see him -- only to be arrested. It is unclear whom Abbas and her daughter were convicted of killing; prison officials did not respond to questions about their case.
"They told me to sit down and shut up and don't ask any questions," Abbas said as tears rolled down her face. "They looted my house. They stole everything. They sentenced me to life in prison without any eyewitness, without any evidence. I don't know the killer or the victim."
Her son had been dead for a year, a fact she learned only after receiving a report from the morgue. He had been tortured and his body burned.
In a confidential memo to Midhat Mahmoud, head of the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council, Hashimi's chief of staff asked that Abbas' case and several others be reviewed. Mahmoud did not respond to The Times' questions about the Abbas case, or other allegations from women who said they were raped, beaten or otherwise abused.
One woman told Hashimi she confessed to murder because she was tortured by investigators.
"They threatened to rape me," she said. "They stripped me naked and they tortured me with electricity and other devices. I admitted it after all this torture."
The women's allegations are rarely investigated, said Farah Saraj, Hashimi's head of women's issues, who is heading reform efforts at the prison.
Wijdan Salim, minister of human rights, said the women often come forward after too much time has passed. In other cases, their injuries are not documented properly -- a problem she is trying to remedy by hiring a female doctor to work at the prison.
"We are pushing the judicial council; we are pushing the Ministry of Information," Salim said. "We are trying to have crime documents to work in a better way. Everything will be better step by step."
More often than not, the women have little recourse, said Hania Mufti of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. "There are numerous complaints and little action," she said. "There still remains very little political will to hold people criminally liable on torture."
In the rare cases in which action is taken, Mufti said, the punishment is administrative, not criminal, such as a suspension or termination of police officials or prison guards.
