IRAQ: With six US soldiers reprimanded and six others facing criminal charges, Iraq's prisoner-abuse scandal looked far from over yesterday as more Iraqis came forward to allege maltreatment by US troops.
"If the Americans ever come back to detain me I will commit suicide before I am taken to this place again," Mr Sha'aban al-Janabi, a former prisoner, said as he pointed at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Mr Janabi, seized last December near Falluja and accused of participating in attacks on US forces, says he was beaten frequently during the 25 days he spent inside Abu Ghraib before being set free in farmland on the outskirts of Falluja.
"I was blindfolded and handcuffed, we were dumped outside on a gravel yard for 10 days, we were given one bottle of water all day for cleaning and drinking," he said on returning to the jail to look for relatives who were arrested with him but are still being held.
On the flat scrubland outside Abu Ghraib, where tens of thousands of people are believed to have been tortured and put to death under Saddam Hussein, dozens of men and women now gather each day hoping for news of relatives seized by America.
Reports of alleged prisoner abuse inside, first broadcast on US television, have reached them too.
US President George Bush told his defence secretary on Monday to take "strong actions" against those responsible and find out if the problem was more widespread.
Some Iraqis say Abu Ghraib is something of a sanctuary compared with what happens in other US-run prisons in Iraq.
Mr Abdullah al-Dulaimi, who was standing outside Abu Ghraib trying to get information about two brothers detained there, said he had been held in a detention centre near the border with Syria for a month in January.
He says he was once put in something called the "coffin", a wooden box too short to stand up in, for two days. He says he was also frequently beaten and had electrical wires attached to his penis.
"We were beaten, deprived of sleep and humiliated," he said.
"If you ever talked to the prisoner next to you, you would have to do push-ups with a soldier standing on your back. They made us stand naked and then a soldier would come beat us with a stick and sometimes sodomise us with the stick," he said.
None of the claims by former prisoners could be verified.
The US military said it could not rule out opening further investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq in the future if credible claims by former and current prisoners were raised.