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Closes in June...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1727465,00.html

Abu Ghraib to close

Agencies
Thursday March 9, 2006

The notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is to be closed, probably within three months, the US military said today.
Around 4,500 prisoners at the detention centre to the west of Baghdad will be transferred to other prisons.

A US military spokesman said operations would transfer to Camp Cropper, a new detention facility at the US military headquarters at Baghdad airport, Reuters reported.

The base at the airport currently holds more than 120 high-security detainees, including Saddam Hussein.

Outrage was caused around the world in 2004 when images emerged of US troops abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib the year before. Ten low-ranking US personnel were convicted over the abuse scandal.

Reuters said US forces were currently holding more than 14,000 people in four jails in Iraq, more than half of them at Camp Bucca, in the south of the country.

Earlier today, Iraq hanged 13 insurgents, marking the first time militants have been executed in the country since Saddam was toppled almost three years ago.

The death penalty in Iraq was removed in the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion in March 2003.

But Iraqi authorities reinstated it after the official end of the US-led occupation in June 2004, so they would have the option of executing Saddam if he is convicted of crimes committed by his regime.

The first people to be executed were three murderers who were hanged in September last year. They were convicted of killing three police officers, kidnapping and rape.

Today, announcing the first insurgents to be executed, the Iraqi cabinet released the name of one - Shukair Farid, a former policeman in the northern city of Mosul.

Farid allegedly confessed that he had worked with Syrian foreign fighters to enlist fellow Iraqis to carry out assassinations against police and civilians.

A statement from the Iraqi cabinet said: "The competent authorities have today carried out the death sentences of 13 terrorists."

It said Farid had "confessed that foreigners recruited him to spread the fear through killings and abductions".

Saddam is currently in the dock in the first of a series of trials over alleged genocide and crimes against humanity. In the current trial, he and seven co-defendants face charges of massacring more than 140 people in Dujail, north of Baghdad, after an alleged assassination attempt against Saddam in 1982.

Death sentences must be approved by Iraq's three-member presidential council headed by the president, Jalal Talabani, who opposes capital punishment.

Both for the September executions and again today, Mr Talabani refused to sign the authorisation himself but gave his two vice-presidents the authority.

In other developments, the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, told a congressional hearing that if civil war broke out in Iraq the US military would depend on Baghdad's security forces to deal with it "to the extent they are able to".

Earlier this week Mr Rumsfeld said reports had overestimated the possibility of civil war breaking out in Iraq following the sectarian clashes provoked after insurgents destroyed an important Shia shrine in Samarra last month.

Today he conceded there was a high level of "tension in the country, sectarian tension and conflict", but he added that it had not yet become a civil war "by most experts' calculation".

Mr Rumsfeld said: "The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the - from a security standpoint - have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to."

He said the key to avoiding civil war is for Iraq's political leaders to succeed in their efforts to form a government of national unity.

Mr Rumsfeld and the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, expressed their support for the Bush administration's request for £53bn in funds. The administration wants the money to pay for the US military's presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.