The Long Interrogation

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With a photo by Edward Keating (is he back with NYT?), from the New York Times Magazine:

Late one afternoon in February 1978, according to sworn testimony, a squad of revolutionary guards arrived at the home of Edgegayehu Taye, a 22-year-old civil servant. They told her she was wanted for questioning. She went without protest. The guards pushed her into the back seat of a Volkswagen and drove her some distance, until the car reached a corrugated metal gate marked by a sign that read: “Higher Zone 9.” The guards took her into the main office. Edgegayehu was ordered to strip naked and was bound with rope at her wrists and knees. Then the guards ran a pole through the loops in the rope and hung her between two desks, like a pig on a spit. They lashed her with plastic cables.

Over and over again, the man behind the desk, the one with the afro, asked her, “Are you a member of the E.P.R.P.?”

Years later, when she saw the man standing by the elevator at the Colony Square Hotel, Edgegayehu wasn’t sure it was Kelbessa at first. He’d gotten older, gained some weight, lost his swagger. He certainly didn’t seem to recognize her. Then Kelbessa smiled widely and greeted her, and she knew for sure. “The voice,” she told me. “You don’t forget the voice.”

Here.