Wealthy brother of UK football chief linked to gruesome Gulf 'torture tape'

A shocking videotape showing a wealthy prince from the United Arab Emirates brutally torturing a man in the desert has brought a sharp focus on western dealings with the oil-rich Gulf state. The man at the centre of the 45-minute tape, which shows bloodcurdling scenes of abuse and was smuggled out of the country in secret, is Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a half-brother of the owner of Manchester City FC. Issa is shown attacking a helpless Afghan merchant he accuses of cheating him on a business deal. He fires guns at him, inserts a cattle prod in his anus, sets fire to his testicles and runs him over.

The tape was first obtained by the ABC News television channel and broadcast last week. The tape is so gruesome that it is bound to cause ructions across the world because of Issa's network of family connections, many of them friendly with western firms, universities and politicians, and the fact that he has not been punished for the attack.



Issa is the brother of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy head of the UAE armed forces. He is also the half-brother of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who last year spent £210m buying a 90% per cent stake in Manchester City. Mansour is a key political figure and is a member of the UAE federal cabinet and minister of presidential affairs. The tape is a terrible blow to the human rights image of the UAE, which for decades has been portraying itself as a western-friendly country ripe for trade and investment.

The video is especially shocking because it also shows a man in police uniform helping to tie up the victim and hold him down in the middle of the desert. At the start of the torture session, which is believed to have happened some time before 2005, Issa stuffs sand in the victim's mouth and fires a machine gun into the sand around him as the man screams helplessly. At one point, Issa tells the cameraman to get a close-up. "Get closer. Get closer. Get closer.Let his suffering show," the sheikh says.

This video just shows a fraction of the brutality.


Later the sheikh beats the man with a wooden plank with a nail protruding from it, and pours salt in the bloody wounds left by his blows. He also inserts an electric cattle prod in the man's anus and turns it on, and pours lighter fluid over the man's testicles, which he then sets alight. Finally, the man is held down in the sand and a Mercedes is driven over him. The sound of bones breaking can be clearly heard.

The victim, an Afghan grain merchant called Mohammed Shah Poor, apparently survived the experience, because the government later justified taking no action against the sheikh by saying the matter had been settled privately between the two men and each had agreed not to press charges against the other.

You can see more of the shocking video here.