KATHMANDU: A journalist who was tortured and imprisoned for two years by Nepal’s army during the country’s bitter civil war is calling for perpetrators of serious human rights abuses to own up to what they did.

Bhaikaji Ghimire was detained in December 2003 just after interviewing a Maoist wanted for the killing of a senior army commander in Kathmandu.

“They didn’t come to arrest me, they were there to arrest (Maoist) Bhim Giri. I told them I was a journalist,” Ghimire said.

Today, after signing a peace deal in late 2006, the Maoists have positions in government, but when Ghimire was detained, the government classed the ultra-leftists as terrorists and put prices on the heads of senior leaders.

Ghimire, 36, was taken to Bhairabnath Battalion army camp in the north of the capital, where hundreds of Maoist suspects were held and systematically tortured.

“They placed a gun in one of my hands, and five bullets in the other, and took my picture and said that I was carrying them when I was arrested,” he said.

While at the camp, Ghimire, editor of the Yugdrasta weekly newspaper, was stripped naked and repeatedly ducked head first into a tub of filthy water before being given electric shocks until he passed out.

The journalist spent 15 months in the army camp and was transferred to a prison where he spent another seven months before being released after a campaign by the Federation of Nepalese Journalists.

Ghimire, who says he never had any link to the Maoists other than as a journalist, was lucky to escape alive.

In May 2006 the UN released a report detailing the brutal treatment of suspects in the camp, all of whom related accounts of systematic and routine torture similar to Ghimire’s.

Despite his treatment, Ghimire does not want to see his torturers punished, just for them to admit what they did.

“The people in the barracks were soldiers following orders,” said Ghimire.—AFP