Ministry probes alleged abuse of Iraqi civilians

London: The Ministry of Defence has confirmed it is investigating 33 cases of alleged abuse, including rape and torture of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers.

The lawyer representing the alleged victims, Phil Shiner, said there could be hundreds of uninvestigated claims of abuse.

One claimant alleges that soldiers based the abuse they allegedly subjected him to on photographs of the abuse at the notorious US detention centre at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, The Independent reported. In one case, British soldiers are accused of piling up Iraqi prisoners on top of one another before subjecting them to electric shocks.

Shiner served a pre-action protocol letter on the Ministry of Defence last week and is asking for a judicial review of the cases.

In the letter, it was reported, Shiner said the allegations raised questions of collusion between Britain and the US over the ill-treatment of Iraqis.

Humiliation

"Given the history of the UK's involvement in the development of these techniques alongside the US, it is deeply concerning that there appears to be strong similarities between instances of the use of sexual humiliation," he told the paper.

The Iraqi human rights campaigner Mazin Younus, who has been investigating allegations of abuse by British troops since 2004, said on yesterday: "It was quite shocking actually, that we started seeing a pattern very similar to Abu Ghraib where sex or sexual humiliation is used, like playing porn movies in the corridors while the prisoners are in their solitary cells, especially at prayer times.

"Then more serious stuff started coming up, when we realised some female soldiers were exposing themselves in front of prisoners while they were in toilets or showers. On one occasion, one female soldier tried to have sex with one of the detainees while he was resting after an operation in a hospital bed."

Shiner said that since the British withdrawal from Basra in southern Iraq in the summer, a host of abuse allegations had been made dating back to 2003.

He said: "I have it on good authority that there are hundreds of cases that are going uninvestigated. But if you are an Iraqi and terrible things have happened to you then how would you know that we have a judicial system in this country to deal with it? My guess is that many of them will remain buried."

One Iraqi claims that he was raped by two British soldiers in 2003 when he was 16, while others claim they were stripped naked, abused and photographed by male and female soldiers.