Blonde woman sailor stripped by Aryans

[mord]

Woman sailor says Iranians taunted her with death 
 
Apr 8 06:48 PM US/Eastern
       
 
 


View larger image

  The female sailor captured and held by Iran told the Sun newspaper in an interview to appear Monday that her captors stripped her, lied to her and suggested she might never see her baby again.
Hours after the defence ministry relaxed its ban on service personnel striking financial deals with media organisations, mother-of-one Faye Turney, 26, told the tabloid her interrogators taunted her with threats to her life.

"At one stage ... (the interrogator) asked me, 'How do you feel about dying for your country?" she told the paper.

"The next day, another interrogator said to me, 'You don't understand, you must cooperate with us. Do you not want to see your daughter again?"

For the first five days of the 13-day detention, Leading Seaman Turney was also made to believe that the other 14 detainees -- all men -- had gone home, and she was the only one left.

"I was thrown into a tiny little cell and ordered to strip off," Turney told the newspaper.

"They took everything from me apart from my knickers. Then some cotton pyjamas were thrown in for me to wear and four filthy blankets. The metal door slammed shut again."

She was among eight sailors and seven marines held by Iran after it claimed they trespassed into Iranian territorial waters on March 23 -- Britain insists the group were conducting routine anti-smuggling operations in Iraqi waters.

On Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that the group would be released, and they arrived back in Britain on Thursday.

Newspaper reports on Sunday suggested the 15 captured sailors and marines could make up to 250,000 pounds (371,000 euros, 496,000 dollars) between them, with Turney standing to net 150,000 pounds.

The Sun acknowledged that it had paid her for the interview, without specifying how much, and noted that she had decided to donate a share of her fee to the charitable fund for her ship, the HMS Cornwall.

Along with some of her other crew members, Turney has come in for criticism for accepting payment for interviews with the press.

Turney at one point spoke of how she feared Iranian officials were "making my coffin" after she heard "the noise of wood sawing and nails being hammered near my cell ... Then a woman came into my cell to measure me up from head to toe with a tape."

Soon after they were captured in the Gulf by Iranian troops armed with AK-47s and a rocket propelled grenade launcher, Turney also mouthed to the group's leader, Captain Chris Air: "Are they going to rape me?"

Turney told the paper how at night she was taken to an interrogation room for sometimes multiple questioning sessions, one of which concluded at 6 am.

"They asked which were my ship's ports of call, where were other coalition ships in the Gulf, how do Royal Navy ships protect themselves, how do we communicate, what was the US doing?"

"That could have put my colleagues at risk, and there was no way in hell I was ever going to do that, no matter what they did."

Several members of the group were regularly paraded on television, apparently confessing for trespassing, and three letters -- attributed to Turney -- were released by Iran in which she apologised for the group's actions, and questioned Britain's military presence in Iraq.

Turney said that she had purposely written the letters "in such a way that my unit and my family would know it wasn't the real me" after two new interrogators offered to free her "within two weeks" if she confessed.

She told The Sun that her interrogators threatened she would be put on trial for espionage if she did not accept their offer.


Copyright AFP 2005, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium