According to the detainees themselves and other witnesses, the RDR leaders were subjected to particularly severe forms of torture. In most cases it was gendarmes, including officers up to the ranks of lieutenant and captain who perpetrated this abuse. Souleymane Kamarate Kone, thirty, who works in the communications department of the RDR, was tortured after being captured with Jean-Philippe Kabore and several others. From within the MACA he described the extent of the abuse received following their arrest on December 4, and how one RDR official died from the injuries sustained while in the custody of the gendarmes:90 At around 17:30 p.m. on December 4, I went with Jean-Philippe Kabore, the son of Madame Diabaty, and four others to check on her house, which is near the American Cultural Center. There were rumors that it’d been attacked. We went out thinking things had calmed down. On our way, we passed by one gendarme checkpoint without problem, but ran into serious problems after the second one, which was just near the national television station. They asked us where we were going and Jean-Philippe explained that he was going to his mother’s home. They asked who his mother was, and when he responded, ‘Henriette Diabaty,’ they became aggressive and hysterical. The gendarmes who’d stopped us called for the others to come running—there were about twelve—and started shouting, ‘we’ve captured the son of Henriette.’ They ordered us out of the car, told us to take our clothes off and then started beating us with their belts, gun butts, and wood. One of them stabbed me and the others with the bayonet on the end of his rifle. When they’d searched us they found the small pistol that Fofanah, one of Madame Diabaty’s bodyguard carries; he’s a bodyguard and had a gun permit so it wasn’t anything illegal. When they found the pistol they went crazy. They beat him savagely and kicked him in the face with their boots. At one point they forced him to open his mouth, and sprayed a tear gas canister directly into him. After about twenty minutes of this, they ordered us to go inside the national television station, where they left us with a second group of about thirty gendarmes including several officers with two and three bars [the insignia of lieutenant and captain]. They beat and tortured us as well. At one point a gendarme officer, who said he knew I worked in the RDR communications department, ordered me to give him the names and whereabouts of the survivors from the Charnier de Yopougon. To make me talk he burned my pubic hair and around the testicles with a cigarette lighter. This happened several times. I saw the others being tortured as well. The national TV journalists saw everything that happened to us in there. After two hours they sent us, nude and bleeding, to the National Gendarme Academy. After arriving there, an officer who I believe is the boss, came to meet us and was visibly angry at his men for what they did to us. He asked, ‘Why did you beat them?’ and ordered that we be given clothes. Shortly after we arrived, Fofanah, the bodyguard, passed out from his injuries and from the tear gas. One of the officers ordered that he be taken to hospital. I saw there were about fifty other detainees already inside, all of them bleeding. We weren’t actually beaten at the National Gendarme Academy and at around 21:00h, the remaining five of us were put into an ambulance. We thought we were going to be taken to a hospital to receive treatment but instead they took us to Agban Gendarme Camp where we joined several hundred more detainees. The very worst of our very bad experience began the moment we arrived at Agban. First they told us to get undressed and then they beat everyone until blood was flowing from all of us. They treated Jean-Philippe the worst of all. They put some kind of yellow powder in a rubber dropper and put it in our wounds and eyes. As we lay bleeding on the ground, they told us we were 90 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, February 10, 2001. Human Rights Watch 48 August 2001, Vol. 13, No. 6(A)