US to hand Abu Ghraib jail back to Iraqis

The US military says it will begin moving thousands of prisoners out of Abu Ghraib prison to a new jail near Baghdad’s airport within three months and hand the notorious facility over to Iraqi authorities as soon as possible.

Abu Ghraib became infamous as the prison where US soldiers abused Iraqi detainees and, earlier, for its torture chambers during Saddam Hussein’s rule.

The sprawling facility on the western outskirts of Baghdad will be turned over to Iraqi authorities once the prisoner transfer to Camp Cropper and other US military prisons in the country is finished.

The process will take several months, said Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a US military spokesman in Baghdad.

Abu Ghraib currently houses 4,537 out of the 14,589 detainees held by the US military in the country.

Iraqi authorities also hold prisoners at Abu Ghraib, though it is not known how many.

The US government initially spoke of tearing down Abu Ghraib after it became a symbol of the scandal. Widely-published photographs of prisoner abuse by American military guards and interrogators led to intense global criticism of the US war in Iraq and helped fuel the Sunni Arab insurgency.

But Abu Ghraib was kept in service after the Iraqi government objected. Planning for the new facility at Camp Cropper began in 2004.

General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that the US wants to turn Abu Ghraib over to the Iraqis as fast as possible.

He said: “There are facilities being built so that the US can pull out of Abu Ghraib. Then it will be up to the Iraqi government to decide what they want to do. It’s an Iraqi decision, I just don’t know that they’ve made that decision.”

The Iraqis are likely to use Abu Ghraib as a jail for some time as they do not have the money to build new ones.

The Iraqi Cabinet announced yesterday that it hanged 13 insurgents, the first executions of militants since the removal of Saddam.

The announcement listed the name of only one of those hanged, Shukair Farid, a former policeman in the northern city of Mosul, who allegedly confessed that he had worked with Syrian foreign fighters to enlist fellow Iraqis to kill police and civilians.

“The competent authorities have today carried out the death sentences of 13 terrorists,” the Cabinet announcement said.

Farid had “confessed that foreigners recruited him to spread the fear through killings and abductions”, the government said.

A judicial official said the death sentences were handed down in separate trials and were carried out in Baghdad.

Capital punishment was suspended during the formal US occupation, which ended in June 2004, and the Iraqis reinstated the penalty two months later for those found guilty of murder, endangering national security and distributing drugs.

The authorities also wanted to have the option of executing Saddam if he is convicted of crimes committed by his regime. Under the former dictator, 114 offences were punishable by death.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial for allegedly massacring more than 140 people in Dujail, north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt against him there in 1982.

An Iraqi Justice Ministry official said the US military had released two senior members of Saddam’s former regime, including a deputy prime minister, after finding they were not involved in crimes against humanity.