Date:11/03/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/03/11/stories/2006031103701400.htm

International

U.S. to close Abu Ghraib prison

Suzanne Goldenberg

Washington: Abu Ghraib, the prison which will be forever linked with images of Iraqi detenus stripped naked and humiliated by their American jailors, is to be closed, U.S. military officials said on Thursday.

The sprawling, low-slung prison in the western suburbs of Baghdad, a torture chamber under Saddam Hussein that gained even more notoriety with the photographs of abuse committed by U.S. troops, is likely to close within three months.

Inmates to be shifted

Its 4,500 inmates will be transferred to other jails in Iraq - including Camp Cropper, the facility at the Baghdad airport where Mr. Hussein is being held. Lieutenant Colonel Keir-Kevin Curry, the spokesman for U.S. detention operations in Iraq, told Reuters news agency: ``No precise dates have been set, but the plan is to accomplish this within the next two to three months.''

He said the handover would take place in phases, beginning with the training of Iraqi prison guards.The buildings at Abu Ghraib, built by a British contractor in the 1960s, and the tented camp thrown up by American forces in 2003 to hold the overflow of detenus, are to be handed over to the Iraqi Government.

In April 2003, a few days after the fall of the Iraqi regime, the London-based Guardian newspaper visited the prison with one of its former inmates under Mr. Hussein, and we were led through the punishment units, windowless cinder block cells one metre by 50cm, the yellow holding pen where men fought to sleep next to the stinking latrine because it gave them a few centimetres more space, and the courtyard, where hangings were held on Mondays and Wednesdays.