Iraqi officials deny captives in horrific condition

Iraq's Interior Minister yesterday defended the treatment of abused prisoners found in a Government bunker, declaring that "no one was beheaded or killed".

But although Bayan Jabr insisted that the allegations of torture were "exaggerated", fresh details emerged of the horrific conditions endured by the captives.

Witnesses said many of the 169 men and youths were so emaciated that they looked like Holocaust survivors.

Some had suffered beatings so severe their skin had peeled off and three men had been kept locked in a cupboard where they could not move. All the others were packed, blindfolded, into three rooms about 3m long and 3.5m wide.

Instruments of torture and beating were found hidden in a false ceiling. Witnesses also said that the guards in charge of the detainees, all but three of whom were Sunnis, at an Interior Ministry bunker in central Baghdad, wore combat fatigues of the Shia Badr militia.

"Because of the appalling overcrowding some of the most badly treated were squashed on to floors and their skins got stuck to the floor," said a witness. "Others developed infections. The conditions they were kept in was awful."

Jabr, a former member of the militia, insisted that only seven of the prisoners showed marks of torture, and those responsible would be punished.

But he continued: "You can be proud of our forces, our forces respect human rights. We are the Government and we are responsible for protecting you."

Those being held were "the most dangerous criminal terrorists", said the minister at a press conference.

Waving a clutch of passports, he continued: "Those detainees, those criminal killers inside the bunkers were not Pakistanis or Iranians. Those are your Arab brothers that came here to kill your sons."

Asked about one prisoner who was paralysed, Jabr said the man was a Shiite who was responsible for four car bombings resulting in 66 deaths in return for US$1000 from Sunni insurgents.

The minister, accompanied at the press conference by commanders of Iraqi special forces, said the torture allegations were made by those supporting the insurgency and were, at the same time, using the US authorities to try to undermine him.

The abused prisoners were discovered in the underground complex at Jadriyah by American troops and Iraqi police trying to trace a 15-year-old boy whose family had access to a US congressman.

The search party, led by Brigadier-General Karl Horst, were at first shown cells towards the outside of the building with a relatively small number of prisoners.

The discovery of the 169 others came after Horst insisted that a locked door be opened up.

The evidence of torture by the US-sponsored Iraqi Government is acutely embarrassing for the Bush Administration, with reverberations still echoing from the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The US Ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the military commander, General George W. Casey, met Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari as the news of the scandal broke and are said to have been instrumental in persuading him to launch an immediate inquiry.

But Sunni leaders continued their demand for an international probe, saying the Shiite-dominated Government had ignored other complaints of sectarian killings and abductions.

- INDEPENDENT