BAGHDAD, 21 July 2003 — Amnesty International accused US troops yesterday of “very severe” human rights abuses in Iraq and complained that it had been denied access to thousands of prisoners held without charge in “appalling” conditions. Amnesty spokeswoman Judit Arenas Licea said some Iraqis had been forced to stand under the blistering sun for up to 48 hours in US-run detention centers that lack proper sanitation and that relatives had no information on their plight.

One detainee was shot dead by US troops during a prison riot last month, she told Reuters in an interview in Baghdad. “We are disappointed that human rights were used as an excuse to go to war in Iraq and now the human rights of Iraqis are being violated,” she said, condemning conditions at among other sites Saddam Hussein’s once notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

US military officials declined immediate comment. A team from the London-based independent rights watchdog is visiting Iraq to take testimony from those held and released by US forces and to try and speak to some of those still held.

It is also investigating abuses under Saddam, although most of those imprisoned by him are now free. While some Iraqis detained by invading troops have been released, many remain in prisons with no access to a lawyer or families, Licea said. The US military authorities have repeatedly turned down Amnesty’s requests for access to those jails, Licea said.

Some Iraqis are being held by the Americans at the Abu Ghraib complex near Baghdad, one of the most feared prisons under Saddam. Today it is heavily guarded by US troops. Licea alleged that American soldiers shot and killed detainee Alaa Jassem there on June 13 while trying to contain prisoners rioting against poor conditions.

When Amnesty tried to investigate prison conditions it got similar answers from US soldiers every time, Licea said: “They just cite security reasons for not giving information. But we know from ex-prisoners that many have not bathed properly for months and there is no sanitation.”

Amnesty has also been denied access to a temporary American prison set up at Baghdad’s main airport where it believes some of Saddam’s top officials are held. US troops, who have lost 37 of their comrades to attacks since major combat was declared over on May 1, have struggled to impose order since they toppled Saddam. Many fear for their lives and so prefer to trust no one on the streets.

But Licea said this was prolonging a vicious circle of mistrust as soldiers were heavy handed in arrests and searches. “People are handcuffed and put on their knees and humiliated. There was one case where a 12-year-old child was handcuffed behind his back with a group of adults. The Americans treat the children like adults.”

Meanwhile, Iraqi doctors initially thrilled with the ouster of their nemesis Saddam Hussein say they are shocked at what has followed in his wake: an outpouring of violence that has brought astonishing numbers of grisly cases to hospital emergency rooms. “In the last four years, I saw two bullet wound cases,” Dr. Ali Khalid tells AFP as he stitches up the abdomen of his latest gunshot victim in the operating theatre of Medical City, Baghdad’s best state hospital complex. “Now, after the war, I see hundreds.”

The spectacular rise in bullet injuries is all too evident in the hospital’s archaic 14-bed emergency room, where doctors juggle hundreds of patients per day in squalid conditions. Three such cases were rushed in within 12 minutes on a recent afternoon, including a woman shot in the mouth, a young man with a bullet in his forearm, and a man in his fifties with a bullet in his chest who, remarkably, was seen walking in under his own power.

The slug, most likely from an AK-47 assault rifle, shone like a silver pendant on the man’s chest x-ray. The next day he had disappeared, and doctors weren’t sure if he was being treated, undergoing or awaiting surgery, released, or dead.

Doctors say they are wholly unprepared to deal with Baghdad’s raging violence, and the political limbo brought on by the US-led invasion is hampering efforts to rebuild medical infrastructure and reorganize health care.

“There is no security, no water, no air-conditioning here,” says Abbas Khalifa, a doctor on duty recently in the emergency room where 200 patients, many of them gunshot victims, passed through in his 12-hour shift.

Medical City seems frozen in time, hobbled by a dozen years of sanctions and hamstrung by a regime which struck fear into doctors and medical workers and took profits generated by the health care industry as a matter of policy.

Such is the state of Baghdad’s public hospitals, many of which were heavily looted in the chaotic power vacuum that followed the Saddam regime’s demise at the hands of US-led coalition troops three months ago. Those like Medical City which were spared the initial orgy of theft are now seen as prime targets for looters, a key reason why many of the 700 doctors on staff at the complex are not showing up for work.