Abu Ghraib victim's identity mistaken

WASHINGTON - The New York Times said it had identified the wrong man as the hooded prisoner standing on a box in a photograph that came to symbolise US military abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

The newspaper's March 11 profile about Ali Shalal Qaissi was challenged by online magazine salon.com, which said an Army investigation had concluded the prisoner was a different man.

"The Times did not adequately research Mr Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph," the Times said in an editor's note accompanying a front page story on the misidentification.

"A more thorough examination of previous articles in the Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr Qaissi's claim," it said.

Qaissi, a former Baath Party official, described how he was arrested in October 2003 and held for nearly six months at Abu Ghraib. It said prison records confirmed he was in detention at the time.

The paper said Qaissi did appear with a hood over his head in other photographs seized by Army investigators. "However, he now acknowledges he is not the man in the specific photograph that accompanied the Times article."

- REUTERS