ABU GHRAIB, June 27: About 450 detainees were released from Iraqi and US-run prisons on Tuesday under a reconciliation plan aimed at bringing guerillas into the political process and ending the deadly tide of bloodshed in Iraq.

The detainees held at Abu Ghraib and other facilities run by the US military and Iraqis were freed under an amnesty contained in the reconciliation plan presented to parliament on Sunday by Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki.

Kurdish lawmaker Mahmud Othman said seven armed groups were holding talks with President Jalal Talabani on laying down their arms, but were demanding ‘that there must be a timetable for withdrawal of foreign forces and also their resistance to foreign forces must be legitimately recognised’.

The United States confirmed on Monday that it was considering a plan to sharply reduce its 130,000 strong force in Iraq by the end of 2007, but said it was just one option among many and was not ‘engraved in stone’.

The New York Times also reported on Tuesday that Sunni-led guerilla groups have approached the Iraqi government with offers to start negotiations on the basis of the reconciliation plan.

“There are signals” from “some armed groups to sit at the negotiating table,” MP Hassan Al-Suneid, a member of Maliki’s Shia Dawa party, told the newspaper.

A US military spokesman in charge of detainee operations said all of the 2,500 inmates released since Maliki first unveiled his initiative are just suspected of being involved in the resistance but have committed no violent crimes like bombing, killing, torture and kidnapping.

Almost 13,000 detainees remain in US custody.

Although there have been numerous releases from Abu Ghraib and other facilities since the April 2004 prisoner abuse scandal, both US and Iraqi authorities were eager to link the latest releases to the Maliki plan.

“There must have been a good security reason for them to be arrested. They all were detained for security reasons,” Rubaie told AFP.