Bouet II neighborhood of Yopougon. In response gendarmes and police gunned down at least thirteen demonstrators, and later swept through the street with bottles of gasoline setting businesses, houses, and cars on fire. At least three people, including two children, died. Sexual Abuse Both male and female detainees were subjected to sexual abuse and humiliation while in the custody of the gendarmes and police, or by supporters of the FPI in the presence of security forces. Human Rights Watch documented the cases of seven men whose genitals were beaten and/or burned, of eleven women who had been raped, and at least twelve other women who had been penetrated with objects, beaten in the genital area, or sexually humiliated. There was considerably more sexual abuse against women during the December wave of election violence than in October. In early December, four women detained within the National Gendarme Academy were repeatedly gang-raped for two days. Several women were also gang-raped by some ten gendarmes and later by several militant FPI youths on the grounds of a technical institute in Cocody. Police cadets and officers within the National Police Academy subjected six women detainees to degrading treatment and in at least three cases forced women to lie naked in front of a group of officers who then inserted sand and police truncheons into their vaginas. One of these women was in the early stages of pregnancy and suffered a miscarriage during her days in detention. Detention and Torture by Members of the Police and Gendarmerie After detaining hundreds of RDR militants, Muslims, and foreigners, the police and gendarmes routinely used extreme forms of brutality and torture, resulting in the deaths of several young men. At least fifteen young men “disappeared” after detention. Numerous mid-and high-level RDR activists were tortured and later imprisoned without due process. Hospital and clinic workers reported treating hundreds of victims for lacerations, broken bones, burns, concussions, and head fractures sustained while in custody. Civilians were detained after being stopped on the street and asked for their identification, dragged out of their homes and workplaces, or seized while participating in demonstrations. Scores of civilians who were uninvolved politically were captured exclusively and explicitly on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or their perceived nationality. Scores of detainees were beaten with iron bars, electrical cable, ropes, belts, truncheons, chains, dog collars, bike chains, gun butts, and tree branches; burned with cigarettes, pieces of burning plastic, irons, and scalding pan lids; doused with cold water and forced to swim in dirty open sewers; forced to walk back and forth on their knees; made to lie under and look into the sun; forced to walk on burning clothes and tires; tear-gassed at close quarters and sprayed in the eyes, mouth, and genitals with tear gas and mace; forced to fight with each other, eat excrement, and drink their own blood, and threatened with death or subjected to mock executions. The most notorious centers for detention were the National Police Academy, the National Gendarme Academy, and the Agban Gendarme Camp. “Disappearances” While Human Rights Watch documented no cases of “disappearance” following the December violence, at least fifteen civilian men, including several foreigners, were captured or last seen and believed to be in custody around the time of the October elections and remain unaccounted for, “disappeared.” Most of those who have “disappeared” were detained at their home or in their immediate neighborhood by men in uniform. In Abobo, nine Dioula men, most from the same extended family, were detained by police and taken away in a public transport vehicle. In Treichville, a wounded man discharged from a hospital never returned home and was believed to have been taken into custody. In Derrière Rail, a twenty-eight-year-old man was dragged from his home by gendarmes in front of his mother. In Abobo, a twenty-five-year-old man from Burkina Faso was captured by a uniformed policeman and two armed men in civilian dress and has never been found. Hospital workers and morgue attendants described repeated visits by family members trying to locate their loved ones. The badly decomposed, unclaimed, and unidentified bodies of forty-five victims of political violence were buried in Abidjan in the evening hours of April 1, 2001, and were speculated to include some of those classified as Human Rights Watch 7 August 2001, Vol. 13, No. 6(A)