Editor’s note: Journalist Subhy Haddad was released under a 1995 general amnesty after serving about 18 months of a seven-year prison sentence.
Haddad, Baghdad correspondent for the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, received a telephone call from Iraqi intelligence early in the morning on Jan. 27, 1994, summoning him to their offices for questioning. A couple of hours later agents searched his house and confiscated some of his documents. Haddad had recently written a piece about military exercises northeast of Baghdad. Haddad, like Aziz al-Syed Jasim, has not been seen nor heard from since.
Haddad had been detained several times before the 1994 case. In the royal era, he was imprisoned for one year after writing an article in Al-Zaman in 1956 supporting Egypt’s position during the Suez Crisis. After the 1958 revolution, he was arrested while working as a translator at the Iraq Petroleum Company in Kirkuk and writing for local newspapers; he said he was detained for several months without trial over his union activity and was later dismissed from the company. In 1963, after the Baath Party first came to power, he was arrested again and severely tortured on accusations of resisting the revolution.