14 May 2004	Friday	23 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

BAGHDAD, May 13: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld paid a surprise visit to Iraq on Thursday, touring the Abu Ghraib prison at the centre of the scandal over tortured detainees as outrage over the beheading of a US businessman continued to grow.

"Don't let anyone tell you America is what's wrong with the world because it isn't," Rumsfeld said at Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad. "We'll get through this tough period, let there be no question."

He arrived unannounced with General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, meeting troops and commanders in a gesture clearly intended to offset the negative news out of Washington.

Rumsfeld told the soldiers that he and Myers had come to "look you folks in the eye and tell you you're terrific. What you're doing is important. It is noble work." "It's been a body blow for all of us," Rumsfeld acknowledged of the scandal ignited by the publication of photographs taken by guards at Abu Ghraib.

They showed Iraqi prisoners in humiliating sexual poses, cowering before barking dogs, made to stand balanced on a box with wires attached to their privates. Rumsfeld got a frosty reception from Iraqi detainees as he toured the Abu Ghraib jail.

Hundreds of them watched from behind a concertina-wire perimeter fence, some of them showing a thumbs-down gesture while others held aloft a tattered Iraqi flag. He arrived just hours after the military reported that a US soldier had been killed and another wounded in a roadside bomb attack on a convoy in Baghdad.

And during his visit the US-led coalition said a US marine had died on Wednesday of wounds he suffered during security operations in Iraq's western Al-Anbar province.

The latest deaths took to 777 the number of American troops killed since the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March last year. Meanwhile, three Iraqis were killed and seven wounded in fresh fighting overnight between US troops and militiamen loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr in Shia holy city of Najaf, hospital sources said on Thursday.

Myers said he did not believe the Iraqi prisoners scandal had undermined the moral justification for the war in Iraq. However, the Vatican said Pope John Paul II would tell President George W. Bush that it was dividing religions when the two men meet in early June.

The scandal seemed to set to widen, moreover, after members of the US Congress said unpublished photos were more sickening than they had expected and cast doubt on Myers's claim that the blame lay with "seven people who are alleged to have done certain things".

Senior officials of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) strongly condemned the torture of Iraqi prisoners by occupation forces in Abu Ghraib, during a meeting at OIC headquarters in the Saudi city of Jeddah.

The Muslim World League, based in the holy city of Makkah, for its part voiced "deep pain at... the dreadful torture," according Saudi news agency SPA. Neither statement mentioned the video of the young American who went missing in Iraq, Nicholas Berg, being decapitated by a group of masked men that was posted on an Muslim website linked to the Al Qaeda terror network on Tuesday.

The commander of US forces in Iraq Gen Ricardo Sanchez said there were intelligence reports that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked to Al-Qaeda, carried out the murder.

A CIA official later said there was a high probability Zarqawi killed Berg. But from Riyadh to Beirut, Arab governments, newspapers and political groups joined in worldwide condemnation of the shocking images. -AFP