Muslim ex-inmate alleges prison abuse

A former inmate who says federal prison workers in Illinois defiled his Quran and tortured him with a nightstick when he complained has filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging he and other Muslims were mistreated at the prison.

Guards allegedly placed Hakeem Shaheed's Quran on a spit-stained floor, then assaulted him with a baton in 2005 when he reported alleged abuses to Justice Department investigators, according to the lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in East St. Louis.

Shaheed, 48, was transferred by wheelchair the next day to a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., where he lived in the "highly secure environment" of death row to protect him. He was released last year, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Web site, and now lives in Atlantic City, N.J.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for the alleged abuses.

The complaint does not detail the abuses targeting other Muslim prisoners.

A Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman declined comment Tuesday because the litigation was pending.

Shaheed was a practicing Muslim imprisoned at the Marion lockup in southern Illinois from April 1996 to early October 2005, according to the lawsuit. Specifics about his convictions were not immediately available.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims at the prison "suffered much mistreatment by guards and employees at the prison," Shaheed alleged.

He reported some of mistreatment to various authorities, including agents with the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General in May 2005, then again three months later, the lawsuit claims.

The next month a prison lieutenant allegedly "intentionally humiliated him by putting his hands on Shaheed's head and squeezing the inmate's kufi" _ his religious knitted hat _ "in an obvious attempt to insult plaintiff's religion."

Shaheed reported that in October 2005, then found "various Marion prison guards and employees determined to torture and otherwise physically and mentally abuse" him.

The lawsuit alleges that unidentified prison workers ground a baton into his spine and at one point pressed it into his pants. Assailants also twisted Shaheed's toes and put a chain over one of them, then "yanked it extremely hard," according to the lawsuit.