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Investigator: Paralegal filed false complaint

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A Marine paralegal who reported that she overheard guards at Guantanamo Bay brag about beating detainees was accused by a military investigator of filing a false report, the paralegal’s boss, a Marine officer, said Friday.

Army Col. Richard Basset, who was ordered by the U.S. Southern Command to investigate the allegations into guards’ actions, met the paralegal, Marine Sgt. Heather Cerveny, late last year at Camp Pendleton, Calif., where she is based, according to Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey.

Basset told Cerveny the guards denied her account of their conversation in a Guantanamo bar — and the investigator accused her of having made a false statement, Vokey told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The investigation began after Vokey, a military lawyer who represents a Guantanamo detainee, filed a complaint with the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office in October and attached a sworn statement from Cerveny, his paralegal. She said she had talked to several guards in a bar at Guantanamo Bay and that they bragged about beating detainees and described it as common practice.

Cerveny said some guards spoke of denying prisoners water and other privileges without provocation at the U.S. military prison in southeast Cuba, where nearly 400 men suspected of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban are held.

The Inspector General’s office ordered the U.S. military’s Miami-based Southern Command to investigate. The Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo, put Basset in charge of looking into what it called Cerveny’s “credible allegations.”

“The result is some Army colonel comes here and accuses her of committing a crime,” Vokey told the AP.

Jose Ruiz, a spokesman for the Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo, declined to comment.

Basset submitted his findings in December, but they have not been made public and are still under review, Ruiz said by telephone from Miami.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, meanwhile, said Friday that it has decided not to open a separate criminal investigation into the allegations about Guantanamo guards. NCIS spokesman Ed Buice said the complaint was referred to his agency, but officials there saw no reason to open their own investigation.