THE US will close Abu Ghraib prison, probably within three months, and transfer some 4,500 prisoners to other jails in Iraq, a military spokesman said yesterday.

The US military released 122 detainees in Iraq today.

THE American death toll reached 2,001 yesterday with the announcement that a soldier died in an accident on Tuesday.

Thousands of Iraqi detainees who have not been brought to trial were allowed to vote in Iraq’s constitutional referendum today at prisons including the notorious Abu Ghraib detention centre.

Insurgents determined to wreck Iraq’s constitutional referendum killed nearly 45 people and wounded dozens in a series of attacks today, including a suicide car-bomb that ripped apart a crowded market in a town near the Syrian border, police said.

An election official today said Iraqi law will allow Saddam Hussein and thousands of other Iraqi detainees to vote in this weekend’s crucial constitutional referendum.

A detainee has died in a suspected murder at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the US military said today.

The US military said it planned to expand its prisons across Iraq to hold as many as 16,000 detainees, as the relentless insurgency showed no sign of relenting one year after the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqi authorities.

Eleven detainees escaped early today from Iraq’s Camp Bucca prison, but 10 were believed to have been caught hours later, the US military and Iraqi police said.

Militants exploded three bombs today in the Iraqi capital, killing at least one civilian and wounding eight others, officials said of the latest in a string of deadly attacks across Baghdad.

An explosion targeted a US convoy today in southern Baghdad, leaving a US vehicle in flames, while gunmen south of the capital assassinated a member of the Babil provincial council.

Attacks against Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison may force the US military to return the facility to Iraq’s government and take their own high-security prisoners to a safer place, a US military official said.

Iraq’s government said today it was holding only 29 foreign fighters at its maximum security prison in Baghdad, throwing into doubt repeated claims foreign insurgents were largely responsible for the violence wracking the country.

The US Army is probing the deaths of at least 32 Iraqis and five Afghans held by American forces since August 2002, the Pentagon has confirmed.

A female soldier in the Army’s 320th Military Police Battalion took “vigilante justice” on Iraqi prisoners who she believed had raped Army Private Jessica Lynch, according to a letter from the battalion’s commander.

Seventeen American soldiers have been suspended pending the outcome of the investigation into alleged allegations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

The US Army has discharged three soldiers for abusing prisoners at a detention centre in Iraq last May, a US military spokesman said.

TWO US soldiers were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad and a city to the west, the military reported yesterday. A third was reported to have died of a non-hostile gunshot wound in a separate incident.

Human rights organisation Amnesty International today presented a memorandum to US civil administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer alleging ill treatment of local people by coalition forces.