IRAQ: Iraqi doctors who treated US soldier Private Jessica Lynch yesterday dismissed allegations made in her biography that she was raped during her capture. The doctors insisted that she had the best possible care.
Surgeons who treated Pte Lynch after her convoy was attacked near the southern city of Nassiriya in the early days of the US-led invasion in March said they were shocked and hurt by the accusations.
In I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story published yesterday, author Rick Bragg says medical records indicated Pte Lynch, who was evacuated by helicopter from a Nassiriya hospital in a US commando raid widely publicised throughout the world, had been raped.
"The records also show that she was a victim of anal sexual assault," according to the authorised biography said. "The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead," the book said.
"Jessi's body armour and her bloody uniform were found in a house near the ambush site, the place that some military intelligence sources said she was taken to be tortured. But Jessi remembers none of this. When she awoke in the military hospital, it was during treatment, not torture. When she came to, the cruelties were over," according to the book.
A rocket-propelled grenade attack on Pte Lynch's Humvee military vehicle on March 23rd left her with a broken leg, arm and ankle and a gashed head. Eleven soldiers were killed in the attack in which the Humvee crashed into another vehicle. Dr Jamal Kadhim Shwail was the first doctor to examine Pte Lynch when she was brought to Nassiriya's military hospital by Iraqi special police.
"We only had a few minutes to save her life, we found a vein in her neck to give her fluids and blood," Dr Shwail said at his home in Nassiriya.
"She was a woman, young and alone in a strange country," he said. "It was our duty to look after her and we did. Now people are saying she was raped . . . it pains us."
Dr Shwail said he saw no signs of rape but neither was he looking for them. "The thought did not cross my mind. Her injuries were consistent with severe trauma, a car crash, nothing else . . . There is no way she could have been raped."