Gang Rape Cover-Up by US, Halliburton/KBR
By Brian Ross, Maddy Sauer and Justin Rood
ABC News

Monday 10 December 2007

KBR told victim she could lose her job if she sought help after being
raped, she says.
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR
coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering
up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men
at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a
shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for
medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and
there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its
then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for
at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security
guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as
part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in
a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a
cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this
container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their
congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and
told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" - from her
American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly
dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where
they rescued her from the container.

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who
first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically
and emotionally."

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she
had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit
disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

A spokesperson for the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security
told ABCNews.com he could not comment on the matter.