US investigating 37 prisoner deaths

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.

The deaths are from 33 separate cases, two of which involved more than one death – eight more cases than the Pentagon publicly reported two weeks ago.

Nine are active cases, and eight of those are classified as murder involving suspected assaults of detainees before or during interrogation sessions.

Two have been resolved as murder cases. Four are called justifiable homicides and 15 have been classified as deaths by natural or undetermined cause, the Pentagon says.

Of the 33 cases, 30 involve detainees who died inside a US-run detention centre. In the three other cases, two Iraqis and one Afghan died while under US control outside a centre. The statistical breakdown was provided by a senior military official.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said members of Congress were given the same information yesterday.

Also, for the first time yesterday, the US Justice Department said it it had opened a criminal investigation into allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq.

Justice spokesman Mark Corallo said the probe involved an unidentified civilian contractor working for the defence department. It was unclear if the case being investigated by the justice department involved a death.

The justice department can prosecute such contractors for crimes committed overseas, including torture, if they are not already under military jurisdiction.

The justice department has also received at least three referrals for possible prosecution from the CIA related to prisoner abuse allegations, but has not announced a full criminal investigation into those cases.

Among cases involving Iraqi and Afghani detainees, only one US soldier is known to have been disciplined.

In that homicide case, in September 2003, a soldier shot dead an Iraqi prisoner who was throwing rocks at him. The soldier was charged with using excessive force, reduced in rank and dismissed from the military.

Another homicide case involved someone working for the CIA and has been turned over to the justice department.

The Pentagon official said that of the nine unresolved death investigations, six cases happened in Iraq – including two at Abu Ghraib prison – and three were in Afghanistan.

Of the two at Abu Ghraib, one is considered a murder case and the other is expected to be determined to be by natural causes.

In addition to the 30 cases involving deaths inside US-run detention centres, there were three cases involving detainees who were outside. One was a death involving a soldier who shot dead an Afghan who had lunged towards a weapon, the senior military officer said.

Another was an Iraqi who drowned after he was forced off a bridge by a US soldier. In the third case, a US soldier shot dead an Iraqi when he lunged at another soldier, the official said.

In the four cases of justifiable homicide, there were a total of eight detainee deaths. Three of the four cases were at Abu Ghraib prison. In one of them, in November 2003, four Iraqis were killed.

An April 2004 case at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq resulted in two deaths. There were cases at Abu Ghraib in April 2003 and March 2004 that each involved one death.

The Pentagon also released death certificates for 20 Iraqi and three Afghani detainees yesterday – the first such public release by the Pentagon.

One of the death certificates is for Nagem Sadoon Hatab, a 52-year-old former Baath Party official who died at a detention centre at Camp Whitehorse, near Nasiriyah, Iraq, in June 2003. It stated the cause of death as strangulation.

Marine Corps Lance Corporal Christian Hernandez, a reservist, grabbed Hatab by the neck, snapping a bone and killing him.

Hernandez was trying to move Hatab, and investigators believed the death was accidental. Hatab was left lying naked, covered in his own faeces, for hours before he was found dead.

Hernandez and his superior officer, Maj Clark Paulus, another reservist, were charged with negligent homicide in the death, but their commanding general dismissed those charges in April.

Paulus, the detention camp’s commanding officer, instead faces a general court martial on a single charge of dereliction of duty, a charge of assault and two charges of cruelty and maltreatment.

The latest revelations came on the same day that new photographs published in The Washington Post depicted a US soldier apparently preparing to strike a shackled detainee, a hooded inmate collapsed with his wrists handcuffed to a railing and a baton-wielding soldier appearing to order a naked detainee covered in a brown substance to walk a straight line with his ankles shackled.

Some prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were forced to denounce Islam and were ridden like animals, fondled by female soldiers, force-fed pork or alcohol and required to retrieve their food from toilets, the Post said, in an accompanying story it said came from secret prisoner testimony.