BAGHDAD — In Baghdad’s maximum-security Karkh prison, Shawki Omar is triply damned, his supporters say.



He’s a Sunni prisoner in a Shiite-dominated jail. A foreigner in a country where outsiders are blamed for fueling an insurgency. And to top it off, an American in a nation struggling with the bloody legacy of the US-led invasion.



“He is discriminated against on three different levels there,” Omar’s wife, Sandra, said in an interview. She said Shawki — a naturalized American citizen of Jordanian-Palestinian descent who was apprehended by US-led forces in Baghdad nearly a decade ago on suspicion of fomenting jihad — had been beaten and denied medication.



American officials say they are aware of Shawki’s torture allegations and of his hunger strike. They said they had raised the issue of abuse with Iraqi officials and that they were investigating.



 Omar’s case is unique in one way: He was the first known American to be slated for trial in Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein courts. He is also one of only five American citizens in Iraqi custody. But his allegations of mistreatment are far from unusual. Erin Evers, a Middle East researcher with Human Rights Watch, said she knew of similar claims, and that they were symptomatic of a shaky criminal justice system shot through with corruption.



“It’s one of the biggest problems in Iraq today,” she said, noting that the Sunni protest movement, which has threatened the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, has prisoners’ rights at the heart of its demands.



Iraqi officials deny mistreating their American prisoner; Deputy Justice Minister Busho Ibrahim said the allegations were “absolutely not true.” But Omar’s Iraqi lawyer, Zeina Ahmad, said that when she saw her client late last year his feet had been so badly beaten they had swelled up and turned blue.



Omar’s path to US citizenship began when he visited South Dakota more than three decades ago. In 1982, he met Sandra, a student at the Pierre School of Practical Nursing in Pierre, South Dakota. The couple married the following year, moving around the country as their family grew.



Sandra Omar, who was put in touch with AP though the London-based prisoners’ advocacy group CagePrisoners, said she grew up “firmly Christian.” When the two wed, she still held on to the hope that Shawki would convert. “It didn’t turn out that way,” she said.



Instead, she converted to Islam, eventually moving to Jordan in 1995 in a bid to familiarize the couple’s children with the Arabic language and Muslim culture. Shawki Omar took a second wife — a Jordanian — and brought the entire family to Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to get his eldest son into university there. He then took a third wife — an Iraqi. What happens next is in dispute.



In a statement, US Maj. Gen. John Gardner alleged that Omar was an Al-Qaeda emissary whose second marriage had made him a member of terror kingpin Abu Musab Zarqawi’s extended family. Gardner said that multinational forces had arrested four Jordanians and an Iraqi insurgent at Omar’s home in October 2004. Under questioning, the general said, the arrested men accused Omar of trying to organize the kidnapping of foreigners in Baghdad.



Sandra said the charges are bogus, suggesting that the information had been squeezed out of Omar’s alleged associates under duress. — AP