WASHINGTON, Oct 22: The US government released thousands of pages of documents on prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, including details on three deaths at Abu Ghraib and alleged molestation of a female inmate by soldiers.

The government released the documents to the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union after a court ordered the government to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU said.

The documents include most of the annexes to an investigation report into the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison by Major General Antonio Taguba, army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) reports, internal FBI memoranda, as well as exchanges of letters between government officials and members of Congress.

The ACLU posted some documents on its website together with an index and brief description of the documents. It said it would post the other documents over the coming days.

Portions of many of the documents were blacked out by government censors, but they appeared to contain some new details on the abuses at Abu Ghraib and at US detention facilities in Afghanistan.

Three reports from the army's CID recorded the deaths of three inmates at Abu Ghraib within days of each other in August 2003 just before most notorious abuses began.

In each case, CID investigations concluded that the "manner of death was natural," including that of a prisoner who had been on a hunger strike for eight days, according to the ACLU's summary. The hunger striker was identified in a CID report as Dham Spah who died August 16, 2003 at Abu Ghraib. -AFP