Tag: torture

Gaza officials formally accuse Israel of organ theft, demand international probe

Gaza’s Government Media Office formally accused Israel on 17 October of stealing organs from Palestinians after Israel returned 120 mutilated bodies following the recent ceasefire, including some who had been tortured to death.

“We formally accuse the Israeli army of stealing organs from the martyrs,” stated Dr. Ismail al-Thawabta, Director General of the Media Office, while demanding an international investigation into Israel’s “torture, mutilation, and organ theft.”

The 120 bodies “arrived in extremely poor and distressing condition,” including blindfolded, bound, crushed under tanks, and missing corneas, livers, and limbs, Thawabta stated.

“The Israeli occupation executed many of them in cold blood. A large number were found blindfolded, with their hands and feet bound, and others showed signs of hanging or close-range gunfire,” he added.

“We also found bodies showing clear evidence of severe torture until death.”

Thawabta explained that Israeli authorities refused to provide the names of the victims, making it extremely difficult for authorities in Gaza to identify them.

After the release of the bodies, families of missing Palestinians rushed to hospitals—especially Nasser Hospital—trying to see if their relatives were among them. But many remain unidentified and will have to be buried anonymously.

“The health system in Gaza is almost completely collapsed. We lack the equipment for DNA testing and forensic analysis. Some families could only identify their loved ones from personal belongings or clothing. If we cannot identify the rest, we will be forced, sadly, to document and bury them anonymously, to preserve human dignity,” Thawabta added.

According to the Media Office’s data, 9,500 Palestinians remain missing, most of them trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings.

“Entire families—father, mother, children—remain buried for nearly two years,” the Media Office director stated.

The bodies are difficult to locate due to the sheer amount of destruction Israeli bombing has caused, and because Israel has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s heavy machinery, bulldozers, and excavators, preventing rescue operations.

“Even now, despite the ceasefire, all crossings remain closed, and Israel blocks the entry of rescue machinery. This is a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in modern history—over 3,000 families completely wiped out, another 6,000 families killed with only one survivor,” Thawabta added.

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German Mayor Tortured For Hours In Basement By Her Own Adopted Daughter, Leaked Police Docs Show

The story of the Social Democrat (SPD) mayor from Herdecke, Iris Stalzer, has taken yet another incredible turn.

New information now reveals that her 17-year-old adopted daughter reportedly tortured Stalzer for hours, nearly killing her own mother. Despite these details, the daughter still has not been arrested.

Stalzer has spoken to the police about what transpired during her ordeal, and now, the details have been leaked to Bild newspaper.

On Oct. 7, at 12:05 p.m., Stalzer’s daughter called emergency services saying her mother had been attacked by several men, was severely injured and was barely conscious.

A witness off the street found the politician bleeding in her armchair in the living room. Later, the adopted daughter told police that was also how she found her mother.

However, despite claims of “several men” torturing the mother, it turns out this was reportedly an orchestrated lie to cover up the horror that had occurred inside the house. Police have since learned that the mother was subjected to grueling torture for hours in the basement of the house.

The suspect attacked Stalzer with deodorant spray and a lighter, trying to set her hair and clothes on fire. The adopted daughter said she wanted revenge; however, it is still remains unclear what she wanted to take revenge for.

The adopted daughter also had two kitchen knives, which she used to stab and slice the politician’s body. Stazler faced critical injuries, including 13 stab wounds.

One of the bloody knives was also found in the 15-year-old adopted son’s backpack, along with bloody clothing from the daughter. The other knife was also found in his room.

Police investigators also found that large traces of blood were scrubbed from the scene, which were later revealed by the police forensics team.

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Howard Rubin, ex-NYC financier with ties to George Soros, arrested for allegedly sex-trafficking women to ‘sex dungeon’ penthouse: feds

A retired Big Apple financier with past ties to George Soros allegedly “tortured” former Playboy models and other women in a Midtown penthouse turned soundproofed BDSM “sex dungeon” for years, federal prosecutors said Friday.

Howard Rubin, 70, was arrested by federal authorities at his home in Fairfield, Ct., Friday morning on charges he sex-trafficked at least 10 women between 2009 and 2019, luring them to swanky New York City hotels and the leased luxury pad near Central Park — where he restrained, beat and electrocuted them, the Brooklyn US Attorney’s Office charged.

The famed former money manager – known as “Howie” or “H” and worth at least tens of millions of dollars – even appeared to revel in the stomach-turning encounters in text messages with his personal assistant, Jennifer Powers, who is also facing sex-trafficking charges tied to the scheme.

“As alleged, the defendants used Rubin’s wealth to mislead and recruit women to engage in commercial sex acts, where Rubin then tortured women beyond their consent, causing lasting physical and/or psychological pain, in some cases physical injuries,” Brooklyn US Attorney Joseph Nocella said in a statement.

One of the West 57th Street penthouse bedrooms was soundproofed and painted red, and had a device that was used to shock or electrocute the women, the feds said. The room also had a cross and bed with restraints where the women would be bound and gagged, according to the authorities.

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The Feds Defend Their Tortures Again

While the public’s attention this summer has been drawn to masked ICE agents arresting folks without warrants, presidentially imposed sales taxes on goods emanating from foreign countries that have been invalidated by three federal courts, and the fruitless Kabuki dance between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, last month, the federal government continues its slow assault on the Constitution at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In April, the feds suffered a major setback when a military judge ruled that evidence obtained under and as a result of torture is inadmissible at the trial of Ammar al-Baluchi, who is one of the five remaining defendants accused in the attacks of 9/11. Al-Baluchi is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the so-called mastermind of the attacks. So-called because Osama bin Laden was the person designated by the feds as the mastermind until they murdered him and his family – without any 9/11-related charges having been filed against him – in his home in Pakistan.

Mohammed and al-Baluchi were to have been tried together, along with their three alleged accomplices when the feds decided that the torture of Mohammed was too egregious for them to defend in a public courtroom.

So, the prosecutors then initiated plea negotiations with Mohammed’s defense lawyers, which resulted in a plea agreement that was accepted by the court, the defense, the prosecutors and their bosses in the Department of Defense. Then the Secretary of Defense at the time, Lloyd Austin, overruled the general in charge of the prosecutions and directed the prosecutors who had initiated, drafted and publicly accepted the plea agreement to ask the court to nullify it.

Following standard rules of criminal procedure, the court declined to nullify the Mohammed plea agreement since, by the time Sec. Austin objected to it, it had become a binding contract. An appeals court disagreed, and the Mohammed case is now back in the military trial court without a trial date.

There is no trial date because there is no trial judge assigned to the case. The trial judge who accepted Mohammed’s guilty plea has since retired, and no judge has been assigned; nor are any judges volunteering for the case. The case docket consists of 40,000+ pages of documents for a judge to read prior to trial.

Whoever the judge is will be the fourth on the case. The prosecution team has changed as many times as well.

Why is this happening? Largely because military justice is to justice as military music is to music – slow, heavy, ponderous, unending and repetitive. Had President George W. Bush not created, and his successors not accepted, the crafting of a Devil’s Island 90 miles from Florida and instead permitted the Department of Justice and civilian federal judges to handle these cases, they would have been resolved 20 years ago.

But Bush believed that at Gitmo his torturers could do as they wished. He argued that because Gitmo is in Cuba, the Constitution didn’t apply, federal laws couldn’t be enforced and those meddlesome federal judges couldn’t interfere.

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Palestinian Boys Allege Sexual Assault, Torture by Israeli Jailers

Palestinian teenagers kidnapped and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces during the genocidal war on Gaza accused their jailers of torturing and sexually assaulting them in a report published Saturday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“They took me from the aid distribution site and transferred me to a hospital in Rafah, where I was interrogated for an hour,” one 16-year-old boy identified by his first name Sami, who was abducted on June 29, told ABC. “They stripped me and conducted a body search. Then, they loaded me into a jeep and transported me to a prison in Israel.”

“During the interrogations, they tortured us – handcuffing us, beating us with sticks, and using electric shocks,” the teen continued. “They did countless things to break us.”

“I was tortured for a week until I lost all sense of time and awareness,” Sami said. “They put me in a one-square-meter cell, where I spent the entire week. I never saw daylight, never stepped outside. They only came to deliver food.”

“They asked if I knew anyone from Hamas, and whether I had crossed over on October 7,” Sami recounted. “They kept pressing me about who I knew and who I had seen. I told them I was just walking down the street – I didn’t know anything.”

“They would beat me. Each person that talked to me would beat me,” the teen alleged. “I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and they put electricity in my legs.”

Mahmoud, age 17, said that his Israeli abductors “began hurling insults, cursing at us, and accusing us of being with Hamas.”

“They stripped us of our clothes and took us to Kerem Shalom, completely naked, with nothing,” he continued. “There, the beatings and torture began.”

“The Israeli women soldiers beat us. They stripped us and ‘played’ here, and here, and there,” Mahmoud said, indicating his genitals. “They beat us with sticks. Got on us while we were lying on the ground. We were handcuffed like that and naked.”

Mahmoud said his captors wanted to humiliate him and other teenage boys in custody, accusing the troops of taking nude photos of them and sending female soldiers to mock and touch his body – an especially shameful ordeal for Muslims.

“When I was released from prison, I had a breakdown,” Mahmoud said. “I felt mentally exhausted and deeply disgusted. What I witnessed – no one should ever have to see.”

“I was tortured, we are children,” he added. “What have we done?”

ABC published photographs showing signs of torture on the teens’ bodies, including from shackling.

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State Department Accuses China of Genocide and Slavery — and Rape, Torture, Starvation of Dissidents

The U.S. State Department published its annual global human rights reports on Tuesday, featuring a profile on the Chinese Communist Party that accused that government of a host of atrocities including genocide, slavery, worker abuse, forced abortions, and various forms of torture against dissidents.

The State Department human rights reports are published annually and broken down by country. The 2025 report published this week covers the year 2024. The profile on China focused significantly on updates regarding the ongoing genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other non-Han ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan. While widespread evidence indicates that the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to violently subjugate the Turkic peoples of East Turkistan for decades, human rights experts largely agree that dictator Xi Jinping dramatically expanded this effort in 2017, turning the region into a high-tech surveillance state and imprisoning as many as 3 million people in concentration camps.

Following a wave of negative publicity and action by human rights groups to raise awareness of the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs in concentration camps, the Chinese government began to describe the concentration camps as “vocational education” centers and claim that most of its victims had “graduated” from the prisons. Survivors of the abuse nonetheless persisted in reported experiences of beatings, psychological abuse, rape, and slavery at the hands of regime thugs at the camps.

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Palestinian prisoners ‘electrocuted, starved, and beaten’ in Israeli jails: Detainees commission

A Palestinian rights group on Friday accused Israeli prison authorities of systematically torturing detainees with electric shocks and other forms of abuse, warning of a growing pattern of physical and psychological cruelty, Anadolu reports.

The Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said conditions in northern Israel’s Gilboa Prison have deteriorated significantly, with special units storming prisoner sections under the pretext of inspections.

During these raids, detainees are handcuffed, forcibly removed from their cells, and reportedly subjected to intense beatings and electric shocks, the commission said, citing testimony from a lawyer who recently visited the prison.

Prisoners are allegedly dragged across the wet floors of shower areas, where their soaked clothes and bodies are then targeted with stun guns to amplify the pain.

“The shocks are not only painful but calculated to break the prisoners,” the commission said. “Some have lost consciousness. Others bled from head wounds after being struck with the metal parts of the stun devices.”

The report also described scenes of humiliation, with Israeli guards allegedly laughing as bloodied detainees lay on the ground.

In addition to physical torture, the commission reported severe food deprivation, noting that prisoners are receiving minimal portions, leading to rapid weight loss.

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Ron DeSantis’ Superior Speaks Out Amid Guantanamo Torture Accusations

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis‘ former boss weighed in on the accusations that DeSantis oversaw the torture of prisoners during his tenure at Guantanamo Bay.

DeSantis, a Republican who has become a leading conservative figure in the United States, was accused of overseeing torture at the prison where the Untied States detained suspected terrorists, despite concerns over detainees being held without criminal charges being filed.

Mansoor Adayfi, former detainee at Guantanamo Bay who was held for 14 years without being charged with a crime, made the accusation during a November 2022 interview on the Eyes Left podcast, in which he said DeSantis observed guards force-feed him amid a hunger strike, laughing during the procedure. DeSantis, however, has not been accused of torturing inmates.

These accusations reemerged on Tuesday following a report from McClatchy/The Miami Herald that shined a light on the governor’s time at Guantanamo Bay, a topic on which he has offered little public comment. He joined the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate in 2006, four years after the facility opened.

Amid these accusations of overseeing torture, DeSantis’ former supervisor, retired Navy Captain Patrick McCarthy, defended the governor, explaining that he was tasked “with detainees when there were any complaints to ensure they were lawfully addressed.”

“DeSantis served honorably and professionally in a very complex mission,” McCarthy told the Herald.

DeSantis has not publicly addressed Adayfi’s allegations, which could not be independently verified.

Retired Colonel Michael Bumgarner told the Herald that DeSantis would have had “very, very intimate knowledge” about conditions at Guantanamo Bay, which have been long criticized by human rights advocates as violating detainees’ rights and due process.

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The Rise And Fall Of Two Crypto Traders Who Tortured A Bitcoin Millionaire For His Password

A shocking crypto kidnapping case involving two self-styled traders has rocked New York. On May 23, Italian crypto millionaire Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan escaped from a luxury townhouse in New York’s upscale SoHo neighbourhood, running barefoot onto a city street and flagging down a traffic officer, according to The New York Post. Carturan told police he had been kidnapped and held captive for nearly three weeks by John Woeltz and William Duplessie.

Prosecutors alleged that during his captivity, Carturan was tortured with a chainsaw and tased while standing in water, and at one point was hung off a roof ledge in a bid to force him to reveal the password to his Bitcoin wallet, reportedly worth $30 million.

According to ABC News, prosecutors said Woeltz and Duplessie lured Carturan to New York by threatening to have his family killed. Once he arrived, they allegedly stripped him of his passport and electronics, bound his wrists, beat him, shocked his feet, struck him in the head with a gun, cut his leg with a saw, urinated on him, and forcibly made him smoke crack cocaine.

Prosecutors said Carturan eventually escaped after convincing his captors to retrieve his laptop so he could access his Bitcoin wallet. When Woeltz left to get the laptop, Carturan ran out and sought help.

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South Africa: Surge in BRUTAL ATTACKS targeting white farmers – Afrikaner campaign group

ATTACKS against South Africa’s white farmers are on the rise with some victims being tortured with electric drills, blowtorches and bleach, according to a new report.

Research by Afriforum, a group which champions the rights of the country’s Afrikaner minority, said assaults on the farms shot up 25 percent last year. And it warned the attacks against landowners were becoming increasingly brutal. Afriforum spokesman Ernst Roets said there was a “racial element” to the violence with research showing only white farming families suffered such levels of savagery.

He said there were more than eight attacks on rural properties every week, 433 incidents in 2018, up from 342 the previous year and the highest recorded by the group.

The number of murders last year was down to 54 from 72 in 2017, its lowest since 2011, suggesting some of the farmers were fighting back.

Mr Roets said: “More victims are shooting back, more are being trained and more are defending themselves.

“They are not allowing themselves to be victims. The farmers aren’t waiting to get murdered, but rather prepared for that contact to happen.”

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