A/HRC/13/42* page 107 detention, he knew very little about the building where the cell was located. The cell had a toilet, which was also the only source of drinking water for the detainee. For food, he occasionally received a piece of bread. He heard a man screaming close by, indicating that other persons were being detained and tortured in the same building, which had bare concrete floors (in the cell) and could not possibly have been a civilian dwelling”.413 213. In another interview conducted on 12 October 2009, X.X., another Chechen who had been living in Dagestan and now living in exile, explained that he had been subjected to harassment and short-term detention since 1991, when he participated in a demonstration against the war. This led to his name appearing on a “black list”, and he was detained whenever there was an incident, and was usually held for one or two days at a time and secretly (incommunicado and without any subsequent judicial procedure). In early 2004, after the deputy head of the local branch of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) was killed, he was briefly detained, taken to a forest, made to dig his own grave and threatened and beaten, then released. He was then seized again in early March, and held in incommunicado detention for three days in a prison where torture was used to extract false confessions. He was then put on trial with all mention of his incommunicado detention erased from the record. With help from his family, he however managed to avoid conviction and to be released.414 214. In a third interview, X.Y. explained how he had been seized from his house in Dagestan in late 2007, then taken to a secret facility that he called a concentration camp “where people do not come back from”, in Gudermes district, Chechnya, run by the FSB, the foreign military intelligence service of the Russian armed forces (GRU) and the Anti-Terrorist Centre. He described being held in an old concrete building, recalled a terrible smell and walls covered in blood, and explained that he had been “severely tortured” for 10 days, which included receiving electric shocks, being beaten with iron bars, and being burned with a lighter. He also explained that he was never given food and received only one glass of water per day, and that he had witnessed a man beaten to death and whose organs were then removed. After 10 days, he was taken to a forest, where he narrowly escaped being extrajudicially executed. He also said that several other secret facilities, such as the one where he had been held, exist in Chechnya, and now also in Dagestan.415 D. Middle East and North Africa 215. With regard to the Middle East and North Africa, the experts gathered information on long-standing concerns about counter-terrorist policies involving secret detention and inadequate or non-existent legal safeguards in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen. 413 Interview with X.Z. (annex II, case 24). 414 Interview with X.X. (annex II, case 22). 415 Interview with X.Y (annex II, case 23).