BAGHDAD, June 25: A US soldier has told how a senior military intelligence commander at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison was present when a detainee died during questioning.

Testifying at a two-day preliminary hearing at a military court in Baghdad for a female soldier embroiled in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, Captain Donald Reese said a "Colonel Pappas" was one of a number of people present during the interrogation.

Colonel Thomas Pappas was commander of the 205 Military Intelligence Brigade at the prison near Baghdad. He is now stationed in Germany, a US military spokesman said.

Thursday, on the first day of the hearing for Specialist Sabrina Harman, Reese described how he saw the bleeding body of a prisoner who had been brought in alive after an October 27 bomb attack on the headquarters here of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Harman, 26, faces a range of charges including desecrating a corpse and mistreating prisoners. She was photographed grinning next to the body in one of the images of the scandal that shocked the world when it broke in April.

"I was told that when he was brought in he was combative, that they took him up to the room and during the interrogation he passed," Reese testified, adding that the first time he saw the man was when he was dead in a shower.

Reese said he was first told that the man died of a heart attack. The body "was bleeding from the head, nose, mouth," he said.

"I heard Colonel Pappas say: 'I'm not going to go down alone for this'," Reese told the hearing.

The body was left locked in the shower overnight to avoid frightening other prisoners and an autopsy was conducted the following day, the captain said.-AFP