16 EL HASKI v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT first night without sleeping because I was interrogated virtually non stop’ (Kamel Chtoubi). The family of Mohamed Chtoubi has claimed that he was raped with a bottle and has insisted on telling us that he was denied treatment in Okasha prison even though he could no longer sit down, as they noticed during his trial. Mohamed Chtoubi was subjected to constant blackmail, being told: ‘confess and your brother will be released’. ‘The day I saw him’, his sister recounts, ‘his nose and mouth were distorted by the blows’. ‘They became more and more perverse as the nightmare went on’, recounted Mohamed Chtoubi, ‘threatening to rape my mother, my wife and my sisters in front of me. They did not, however, forget the physical torture, using electricity, hanging me, choking me with wet rags ... I was abandoned because my condition seriously deteriorated and I spent whole nights screaming after horrible nightmares haunted me as soon as I tried to sleep, as well as not being able to eat anything. They refused me sleeping pills, just like they refused to give me a Koran ... The most difficult thing was above all the fear of being raped, with which I was constantly threatened, and the screams of those being tortured ... After 40 days of this, I no longer knew what was going on or what I was saying or what I was doing ... One day in the month of Ramadan (November 2002) I removed the cover of my mattress to turn it into a rope, which I then tied to the window to hang myself ... My groans attracted the attention of the warders. The doctor who I was taken to see, blindfolded, told them that my low blood pressure could have serious consequences.’ At that point the prison directors summoned Mohamed Chtoubi to tell him than any other attempt on his part would cost him his life and that he would be ‘buried in the nearby forest without anyone knowing what became of him ...’. Three or four days later, new torturers took over with the same methods ... Abderrahman Majdoubi, who was arrested in Tangiers on the night of 2 July 2002, spoke of a place where he was taken from the second day of his arrest, in the presence of five individuals ‘some of whom interrogated me and others beat me. One of them used the edge of a chopper to strike me and another a rubber-coated metal pipe to tap my knees ... then I was pulled and dragged along the ground to be taken to another cell where a torturer hit my face with his boots while his accomplice interrogated me ... In the evening, I was put into a car and when we arrived on the outskirts of Rabat, I was blindfolded.’ He found himself there in a situation of extreme violence and one of the torturers promised Abderrahman Majdoubi that by the time he got out he would weigh just a few kilos. ‘At night, I heard animal sounds ...’. On the same night, they resumed the interrogation with slapping and kicking and the threat of rape using a bottle, up until daybreak. ‘... The torture lasted for 20 days ... My knee hurt so badly that I prayed sitting down and I had to be taken to see a doctor. In that place, I spent my last three days, handcuffed and blindfolded. When I asked for some water for my ablutions and to say my prayers, I was told that I could do it without water and without moving ...’ Kamel Hanouichi, who was sentenced to the death penalty at the trial of Youssef Fikri, testified for his part that when he was taken to Témara, after being arrested in Casablanca, he was, like most of his accomplices, kept in solitary confinement, which was characterised by ‘conditions of extreme cold’. Once his fingerprints had been taken, Kamel Hanouichi did not escape the ritual of blindfolding and also had his feet bound. As he could not walk very quickly, he was beaten, even before being interrogated. ‘When they beat me on the arms and on the soles of my feet with electric