22 May 2004	Saturday	02 Rabi-us-Saani 1425

WASHINGTON, May 21: Abuses worse than those reported from the Abu Ghraib prison were committed at a US military interrogation facility at the Baghdad airport, media reports said on Friday.

And Washington Post came out with new pictures and details of abuses in the Abu Ghraib prision. An NBC News documentary, showed on Thursday night, identified the place as 'a top-secret' interrogation centre known as the 'BIF,' an acronym for Battlefield Interrogation Facilities.

Satellite pictures in the video do not show acts of torture allegedly committed by US troops but the NBC said the Pentagon had already launched an investigation into the allegations.

The facility is run by the US Army's elite Delta Force. "It is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq's prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don't apply," the NBC News quoted senior US officials as saying.

It said the facility only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists - but not the most wanted among former president Saddam Hussein's lieutenants pictured on the deck of cards.

"The prisoners at the BIF are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF's six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he's drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation," the report said.

In Washington, a senior Pentagon official denied allegations of prisoner abuse at the BIF and said the tactics described in this report are not used there. Meanwhile, The Washington Post published two reports on prison abuses in Iraq in its Friday edition, detailing new pictures, testimonies and confessions about conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

In sworn statements, 13 Abu Ghraib detainees speak of horrendous acts of torture and abuse that go well beyond what has been made public so far. Some detainees say they were pressed to denounce Islam or were forced to eat pork.

Others provided graphic details of how they were threatened with rape and forced to perform sexual acts in front of female soldiers. Two detainees swear watching US soldiers sodomizing an Iraqi teenager, while a third, who was sodomized by US soldiers with mercury lights and a baton, speaks of his own ordeal.

One picture shows a US soldier threatening to unleash a ferocious dog on a handcuffed Iraqi prisoner. A video shows how US soldiers stripped Iraqi prisoners and then piled them on top of each other to make a pyramid.

Another picture shows a US soldier ordering an Iraqi prisoner to walk naked with a brown substance smeared on his back. The Post said it had received hundreds of unreleased pictures and videos displaying interrogation techniques not seen earlier.

One picture shows a hooded prisoner, wearing only a woman underwear, handcuffed in a half-bent position while his ankle is chained to a door. He is standing on a box. In another picture, a hooded detainee seems to have collapsed with his wrists handcuffed to the railing.

"They stripped me naked and they took me under the water and made me crawl on the hallways until I was bleeding from my chest to my knees and my hands," said a detainee in his sworn statement. "They were laughing, taking pictures, stepping on our hands, wrote on our bodies, then they forced us to walk like dogs," said another.