抖阴ap

Baghdad, Iraq – Iraqi and U.S. officials disclosed Tuesday that more than 170 malnourished Iraqi detainees had been found in a weekend raid at an Interior Ministry detention center and that some appeared to have been tortured.

U.S. and Iraqi forces discovered the inmates when they went into the facility suspecting that individuals there may have been mistreated, the Pentagon said.

A Sunni politician said the prisoners were Sunni Arabs and accused the Shiite-led government of long ignoring the abuse.

Coalition forces “found things that concerned them,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. He did not say when the inmates were found, but U.S. troops took control of the Interior Ministry building Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said authorities were investigating and the detainees had been moved and given medical care.

“I was informed that there were 173 detainees held at an Interior Ministry prison and they appear to be malnourished. There is also some talk that they were subjected to some kind of torture,” al-Jaafari told reporters.

Amnesty International welcomed al-Jaafari’s decision to order an investigation but urged him to expand the probe to include all allegations of torture. Amnesty also asked him to make the results public.

In Washington, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the administration found the reports troubling.

“We don’t practice torture. And we don’t believe that others should practice torture,” he said.

The first public hint of the allegations came Monday when Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, the Interior Ministry’s undersecretary for security, said an investigation would be opened into unspecified allegations that ministry officers tortured suspects detained in connection with the country’s insurgency.

The prime minister did not say where the prison was located, but Kamal said it was in the basement of a building in Baghdad’s neighborhood of Jadriyah.

Kamal said one of the detainees suffered from polio while others had different wounds on their bodies.

“They were mistreated, and you know what happens in prison,” he said, refusing to give further details how they were tortured. “There were some cases in the past, but this was a big problem. We will try to make sure that such acts are not repeated in the future.”