BAGHDAD, Nov. 17 -- The United States expanded its probe of alleged abuses to all Iraqi-run detention sites nationwide on Thursday, saying Iraq's Shiite-led government had agreed after the U.S. discovery of alleged torture and starvation of Sunni Arabs at a secret Interior Ministry prison in Baghdad.
Law-enforcement officials of the FBI, Justice Department, U.S. Embassy and U.S.-led military forces were expected to aid an Iraqi-appointed citizens group in the investigation, which is slated to cover at least 1,100 sites around Iraq where Iraqi security forces and justice officials are holding prisoners.
The breadth of the crackdown, and the involvement by top U.S. officials including the leading U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, indicated the gravity with which American leaders here viewed the torture allegations -- and the scandal's possible impact on the marginalized Sunni community, whose support is vital to ending the insurgency.
Iraq and U.S. officials in Iraq were "united" in instituting means to "ensure humane treatment of all detainees," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement. U.S. diplomats also issued a rare public rebuke to the U.S.-fostered Iraqi government over the abuse scandal -- warning the Shiite-led administration about the growing charges that it was letting politically and faction-driven Shiite ex-militias run the country's police forces.
"We have made clear to the Iraqi government that there must not be militia or sectarian control or direction of Iraqi security forces, facilities, or ministries," the embassy said in a statement.
The tough talk between allies follows the U.S. Third Infantry Division's discovery over the weekend of 173 men -- most apparently Sunnis and many of them held for months -- in a former bomb shelter of a central Interior Ministry building.
Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, pressed in private meetings with the top U.S. military and diplomatic leaders in Iraq, publicly revealed details of the U.S. raid on Tuesday, telling reporters he had been told some of the men appeared malnourished and had been tortured.
Sunni Arab leaders and private Sunni citizens who said they had been held in the bunker described to reporters how they were beaten bloody, tortured with electric shock and suspended from the ceiling in chains. An American network staffer saw emaciated men taken from the center. Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, deputy to Shiite Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, said some detainees had had their skin stripped off.
On Thursday, Jabr, director of the roughly 100,000 police and special police, denied both the allegations of widespread torture at the secret prison and broader allegations of Shiite militia and Iranian involvement in the ministry's forces.
The interior minister said a U.S. general who discovered the secret underground prison had told him of finding five or six victims of beatings or other abuses there.
Jabr insisted that Sunni Arab and news media charges of more widespread abuses at the center were "untrue and inaccurate."
"I reject torture, and anyone found guilty of that will be punished," he said.