Abstract
After her release on 29 December 1975, Dr Sheila Cassidy accused the Chilean authorities of torturing political suspects and other detainees undergoing interrogation by the Secret Police. This was vigorously denied by Chilean spokesmen. On 19 January this year Dr Cassidy gave evidence before the United Nations Ad Hoc Working Group of the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, describing in detail how she was arrested, detained for four days in a ‘house of interrogation’ where she was ill-treated and humiliated by police officials, threatened with rape and on three occasions tortured by the administration of electric shocks. Three weeks in solitary confinement in another detention centre and five more weeks in the Tres Alamos camp for women political prisoners followed before she was finally released as a result of British diplomatic representations to the Chilean government.
In her statement to the UN Commission, Sheila Cassidy also recounted many stories of torture and brutality inflicted on other women prisoners which she learned about during her internment at Tres Alamos, making it clear that this was hearsay evidence she had no reason to disbelieve but could not herself corroborate.
What follows is the main part of her testimony dealing with her own case from the day she was asked to give medical aid to Nelson Gutierrez (a leftist revolutionary who later spent three months in asylum at the Papal Nunciature and on 21 February left for Sweden) to her release from custody and expulsion from Chile.