WASHINGTON, 7 May 2004 — President George W. Bush yesterday apologized for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers as more photos of prisoner abuse were revealed.

Speaking after talks with King Abdallah of Jordan, Bush said: “I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners.” Bush said the abuse had made Americans “sick to our stomachs”.

The president, however, rejected calls for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to quit or be fired. “He is an important part of my Cabinet and he will stay in my Cabinet,” Bush said.

But he confirmed that he had rebuked the defense secretary during a meeting Wednesday. “I told him I should have known about the pictures and the report” by the Pentagon detailing abuse at the Abu Gharib prison outside Baghdad.

The Washington Post yesterday published on its front page more photos of the prisoners’ abuse, including one of a young woman soldier holding a leash tied around the neck of a naked man.

The Post also showed pictures of naked men bound together in a corridor in front of cells. Another showed a naked man handcuffed to a bed with women’s underwear over his head.

The Post named the young woman soldier as Private First Class Lynndie England, who was also featured in the pictures shown on US television last week that sparked the international scandal over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

England’s mother, Terrie England, told the Post she received a telephone call from her daughter soon after the photos were shown on television. “’Mom’, she told me, ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time’.”

Her father, Kenneth England, said other soldiers asked the clerk, who would process the fingerprints and other details of prisoners, to pose for photos. “That’s how it happened,” he was quoted as saying.

The Post said the new pictures were among about 1,000 digital pictures passed around among US military police who served at the now notorious Abu Gharib.

Included were images of soldiers simulating sexually explicit acts with one another and shots of a cow being skinned and gutted and soldiers posing with its severed head. There are also dozens of pictures of a cat’s severed head, the daily said.

There are also pictures of wounded men and corpses, one of which shows a soldier smiling and giving the “thumbs-up sign,” leaning over a decomposing corpse.

The pictures were circulated among members of the 372nd Military Police Company, an army reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Maryland. They were seized by investigators looking into abuse at Abu Gharib.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had repeatedly urged the United States to take “corrective action” at the prison.

The ICRC has had regular access to Abu Gharib since US-led forces began using it last year, according to chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari.

Notari declined to give details of what the ICRC had seen during the visits.