Washington, December 29, 2005

American forces in Iraq have launched a £30 million programme to expand military prisons after the number of suspected insurgents in custody doubled to 15,000.

The programme forms part of a two-pronged scheme which aims to ensure there is space to keep captured gunmen locked up and to hand over the task to the Iraqis.

More than 3,700 US troops are involved in guarding prisoners in Iraq and Washington wants to bring them home.

But the plan has hit a series of snags, including several instances of mistreatment of Sunni Arab captives by Shias in the Iraqi security forces.

The Americans promised this week that prisons will not be transferred to the new government until it can guarantee adequate treatment of captives. A State Department spokesman said serious problems remained, despite the uncovering by US forces of three torture centres.

"We and the Iraqi government continue to have concern about the way prisoners are treated in Iraqi facilities and in facilities nominally under the control of the Iraqi government," he said.

Amnesty International has described the notion of a swift handover as "frightening". In addition, the Americans are dubious about the quality of some of the guards they have trained.

Those fears were apparently underlined on Wednesday when an Iraqi guard was disarmed by a prisoner, who then opened fire with the stolen AK47.

Nine guards and prisoners were killed and an American soldier wounded. The Americans said there was also an attempt made to storm the Baghdad prison armoury.

The prison building programme will be completed in April and should end the overcrowding at many facilities, where there are currently five prisoners for every four spaces.

The number of suspects in captivity has more than doubled in the past 15 months.

The main prison camps in Iraq are Camp Bucca near the southern port city of Umm Qasr, which holds 8,000 detainees, and the notorious Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad which holds 4,600. Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, holds 124 mostly "high value" captives.

It was announced yesterday that large numbers of American troops will be deployed to "mind" the Iraqi police commando units held responsible for much of the prisoner abuse.

Some of the units are said to be subsidiaries of Iraqi Shia militias with close ties to Iran.