‘It was almost a relief when someone died’: former prisoners on the torture and terror of Eritrea’s secret prisons

About 158,000 Eritrean refugees, who have fled repression, poverty and forced conscription, were living in Ethiopia in 2023. Photograph: Fred Harter

In the darkened office of his church, the preacher recalls how he was tortured. His guards would put a wooden pole behind his bent knees, suspend him upside down from the ceiling and beat the soles of his feet with rubber pipes.

In the two decades before he fled Eritrea with his family in 2020, he spent eight years in detention. Some of it was in airless, underground cells so cramped there was no room to lie down. At other times he was made to break stones and harvest crops. Then there were the torture chambers.