LYNNDIE ENGLAND, the US Army reservist facing jail for abusing prisoners in Iraq, was “having a good time” watching soldiers build a human pyramid of naked detainees, a soldier already convicted in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal testified yesterday.

Private England, infamous for appearing in photographs of the abuse, including one where she held a naked man by a leash, participated willingly in the degradation of inmates at Abu Ghraib, Private Jeremy Sivits told a hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He is serving a year in prison after pleading guilty in the scandal.

Sivits, testifying by phone from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, said that Miss England, 21, had joined other soldiers in “stamping on fingers and toes” of inmates at the prison, once used as Saddam Hussein’s torture chamber.

One published photograph of her shows her sitting with Charles Graner, an alleged ringleader in the abuse and by whom she is pregnant. They are smiling beside a pile of naked men.

“Corporal Graner seemed like he was enjoying it,” Sivits, of the 372nd Military Police Company in Maryland, said. Meanwhile, he said, Miss England was “sitting in his lap, having a good time”.

Miss England, who faces up to 38 years in prison, has said that she was just following orders to soften up the prisoners for interrogation.

But Sivits claimed that he helped to escort a detainee into the jail near Baghdad one night in December 2003 and saw Miss England and another soldier trampling the fingers and toes of a prisoner. At one point he heard a sergeant yell at soldiers to stop.

Once the sergeant had left the area, Corporal Graner and other soldiers took seven detainees with bags over their heads, piled them into a pyramid and photographed them, he said.

Private England is one of seven members of a military police company charged over the abuse. Staff Sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick has said that he will plead guilty to some of the charges against him.

The hearing is to determine whether Miss England, a personnel clerk from Fort Ashby, West Virginia, should face a court martial on 13 counts of abusing detainees and 6 involving the possession of sexually explicit photographs.

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