Rugby coach says he was tortured in Nepal

A rugby coach and former police officer says he was tortured in Nepal after being held over his newly issued New Zealand passport.

Willie Hetaraka, whose rugby jobs have included being New Zealand Maori assistant coach, was stopped at Kathmandu airport while on his way to Europe from India in 2006, where he coached the national team for three years.

Immigration officials queried him about his passport, one of the first to contain a microchip, and he was told that, under Nepal law, he would be held for up to three weeks without charges.

Hetaraka, who coached Sri Lanka at the time, said he was given the option of paying US$8000 (NZ$11,300) to be allowed to leave the country, but refused and was jailed.

"Here I am, a former police chief, stuck inside the prison," Hetaraka, a former senior sergeant and Counties Manukau area controller, told the Sunday News.

"And it wasn't a prison. It was a horse stable at the bottom of a castle. It was worse than a prison. There was no bed, no pillow, no bedding. The bricks on the ground was where you slept."

He suffered a brain haemorrhage and was taken to hospital, where he said police tortured him with boiling water because they thought he was pretending to be ill.

"When I got to hospital, I was lying on the bed and the paralysis set in," he said.

"It was in my first night in hospital. They poured hot water on my legs. I felt a hot sensation like a hot water bottle. The officers were laughing. The nurses were screaming their heads off."

He ended up being paralysed down the left-hand side of his body for five weeks and had to teach himself to walk again, and later spent eight weeks in Waikato Hospital.

Hetaraka said he was still undergoing rehabilitation and could no longer work fulltime.

He said he was in negotiations with the producers of British documentary series Banged Up Abroad, which features the experiences of people arrested while travelling abroad.

Sunday News said attempts to get comment from Nepalese police about the incident were unsuccessful.

Hetaraka has coached Guam on a voluntary basis since last year and was honoured by the American territory this month for his services to rugby.

- NZPA