Iraq is investigating allegations of abuse after more than 170 prisoners were found locked in an Interior Ministry bunker in Baghdad, many of them beaten and malnourished and some apparently tortured. The detainees were discovered on Sunday night during a raid by US troops who were searching for a missing teenage boy. They were found in an underground cell near an Interior Ministry compound in Jadriya, a central Baghdad neighbourhood, and many of them showed signs of severe hunger and beatings, Iraqi officials and US military sources said.

?I was informed that there were 173 detainees held at an Interior Ministry prison and they appear to be malnourished,? Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari told reporters. ?There is also some talk that they were subjected to some kind of torture,? he said. Earlier a deputy interior minister put the number of prisoners at 161 and said he was stunned by their treatment. ?They were being treated in an inappropriate way ... they were being abused,? Hussein Kamal told Reuters.

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?I?ve never seen such a situation like this during the past two years in Baghdad, this is the worst,? he told CNN. ?I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies.? ?This is totally unacceptable treatment and it is denounced by the minister and everyone in Iraq,? he told Reuters.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli called the allegations of abuse ?troubling.? The United States, some of whose forces have been guilty of abusing Iraqi detainees, wants Iraq to punish its personnel if the accusations proved true, he added. ?We don?t practice torture. And we don?t believe that others should practice torture,? Ereli told reporters. ?And so when there are cases of people being accused of torture, we take that seriously; we view it with concern. And we think that there should be an investigation and those who are responsible should be held accountable,? he added.

Kamal said the detainees had all originally been detained with arrest warrants but didn?t say when. They had now been moved to another facility and were receiving medical help. It was not clear why they had been arrested in the first place. Most detainees are suspected of supporting the Sunni Arab insurgency against the Shi?ite- and Kurdish-led government.

Iraq?s Sunni Arab minority has accused militias linked to the Shi?ite-run Interior Ministry and Shi?ite political parties of rounding up Sunnis in raids and holding them without charge. The government has denied the accusations. Kamal said Jaafari, a Shi?ite, has ordered an investigation into the case of the prisoners in the bunker, to be led by the deputy prime minister, a Kurd. ?Whoever mistreated those detainees, or any detainees in Iraq, will bear legal responsibility and be brought to justice,? Kamal said.

US military sources said troops were shocked when they came across the prisoners, some of whom showed the marks of beatings and looked like they had not been fed well for weeks. ?It?s not what we expected at all, we were looking for a 15-year-old boy,? said a soldier from the US 3rd Infantry Division, the Baghdad-based force which conducted the raid.

The allegations follow the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal that broke last year, in which US troops were found to have physically abused and sexually humiliated detainees at a notorious prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad. At least eight low-ranking US soldiers have so far been court-martialed for their part in the abuse, which angered Iraqis and fuelled the two-year-old insurgency.

Mariam KAROUNY