TORTURE BY THUMBSCREW

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 286, 29 August 1931, Page 23

TORTURE BY THUMBSCREW

Tales of Foreign Legion

Horrible tortures to which they declared they had been subjected in the French Foreign Legion prisons in North Africa were described by two deserters who reached Aberdeen in the cargoship Uskport. They are Germans —Ernst Quarti, aged 33, of Offenburg, Baden, and Komp Larenz, aged 25, of Cologne. They escaped from the Legion at Insa, Tunis, and fled to the port of Susa, where they got on board the ship and hid themselves among a deck cargo of esparto grass. An escort from the Legion who boarded, the vessel searched in vain for the deserters. The Uskport sailed on June 22, and it was not until seven days later that

the fugitives were discovered. During all that time they had had nothing to eat. They were wild-eyed and haggard and incapable Of speech. By signs they begged piteously for food. When they had recovered from their privations they said that ope Of them had been iu the Legion five ypqfs and the other four, and had been in prison most of that tipie. They showed by signs that their hands and feet had been chained so that they were practically trussed, and that the thumbscrew had been applied to them. The stowaways will be sent home to Germany, probably on a trawler.