LONDON, Aug 20: US army doctors working at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq helped design abusive interrogation methods and failed to report deaths triggered by beatings , according to a study to be published in the Lancet journal on Saturday.

Citing government documents including sworn testimony of detainees and troops, the respected medical weekly outlined a disturbing litany of failures by medics to safeguard detainees' human rights at the prison.

It said that the failures in some instances constitute serious breaches of international law, providing a further embarrassment for the military, which has already been rocked by documented abuses of Iraqi prisoners by its troops at the prison.

One of the most startling charges in the article by Steven H. Miles of the University of Minnesota was that medical personnel collaborated with the military in "designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations".

It also gave an example where a detainee collapsed and was apparently unconscious after a beating. Medical staff then revived the detainee and left, and the abuse continued.

Mr Miles said that the medical system failed to accurately report illnesses and injuries at the prison, where US soldiers were photographed abusing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners.

Death certificates of prisoners held in US custody in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been falsified or their completion delayed for months, he said. In one case "a medic inserted an intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital".

A surgeon stated that the death of an Iraqi official, Maj Gen Mowhoush, was of natural causes after his head was pushed into a sleeping bag while interrogators sat on his chest. "Six months later, the Pentagon released a death certificate calling the death a homicide by asphyxia."

The study concluded that although the US army's medical services are mainly staffed by humane personnel, "the described offences do not merely fall short of medical ideals; some constitute grave breaches of international or US law".

By the standards of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war "the moral advocacy of military medicine for the detainees of the war on terror broke down".

It also laments that army medics failed to report the use of abuses at Abu Ghraib even though knowledge of torture and degrading treatment was widespread within the system there.

It also cited isolated reports that medical personnel directly abused detainees. "Two detainees' depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner's lacertation from being beaten," it said. -AFP