In recent days, a new videotape showing a prince from the United Arab Emirates torturing a man has surfaced. The man at the center of the 45-minute tape, which shows scenes of abuse and was smuggled out of the Gulf country in secret, is Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Issa is shown attacking an Afghan merchant he accuses of cheating him on a business deal. He fires guns at him, inserts a cattle prod in his anus, sets fire to his testicles and runs him over.
The tape was first obtained by the ABC News television channel and broadcast last week.
According to the Guardian newspaper, Issa is the brother of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy head of the UAE armed forces. He is also the half-brother of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who last year spent £210m buying a 90% per cent stake in the English football club of Manchester City. Another of Issa's brothers is the interior minister.
The video also shows a policeman 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.
On his part, US congressman James McGovern has already called for a freeze on government aid to the UAE. He also wants Issa to be refused US visas. In a letter to the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, he said: "I cannot describe the horror and revulsion I felt when witnessing what is on this video ... I could not watch it without constantly flinching."
The tape was smuggled out of the UAE by US citizen and Houston businessman Bassam Nabulsi, a former business partner of Issa. Nabulsi claimed he himself was tortured in the UAE after refusing to hand over the videotapes following a dispute with the sheikh.
In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa. "The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior," the Interior Ministry's statement declared.
The government statement said its review found "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department."
