The US military has halved the number of Iraqi prisoners held at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail since March through releases or transfers to other detention centres, a Red Cross spokeswoman said today.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is anxious to ensure that people detained by US-led forces do not remain in legal limbo after the occupation formally ends on June 30th and an interim Iraqi government takes over.
"No one should be left in a vacuum, not knowing his legal status," spokeswoman Ms Nada Doumani said.
In its latest visit to Abu Ghraib, at the heart of a scandal over the abuse of prisoners by US forces, an ICRC team found 3,291 internees, including three women and 22 boys under 18, compared to 6,527 in March.
"We have no precise information on how many have been freed and how many transferred elsewhere," Ms Doumani said.
She declined to comment on conditions at Abu Ghraib, but said the ICRC had discussed them with the prison director after its visit, conducted between May 30th and June 3rd. She said the ICRC would soon hand a working paper to US Major-General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of US prisons in Iraq.
A similar ICRC report, leaked in May, catalogued abuses at Abu Ghraib, some of which it said were "tantamount to torture".
Six US soldiers face possible courts martial and one has already been jailed for a year over the abuses at Abu Ghraib, where photographs have shown detainees being sexually humiliated, physically tormented, and threatened with dogs.