THE Bush Administration and the new Iraqi Government condemned the broadcast yesterday of previously unpublished images of US soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, saying that the pictures would worsen tensions across the Middle East.

The images, aired by the Australian public television broadcaster SBS, showed injured Iraqi prisoners, an apparently dead man and sexual abuse.

The pictures, apparently from the same cache of infamous pictures taken by US soldiers at the jail in late 2003, were broadcast less than a week after the release of video footage showing British soldiers kicking and beating Iraqis in the southern city of al-Amarah in 2004.

The broadcast also followed huge protests across the Muslim world over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Danish and other European newspapers.

A Pentagon official told The Times that the broadcast threatened to exacerbate an already tense situation, saying: “The release of these images endangers the lives of US soldiers and in the case of Iraq not just American soldiers.”

Within hours of the original Australian broadcast, the pictures were being shown on al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and other networks across the Middle East. Although some of the most shocking pictures were not broadcast, those that were seemed certain to reawaken bitter memories of the Abu Ghraib scandal. When some of the pictures were first made public in May 2004 they triggered international outrage and fanned anti-US resentment across the Arab world.

Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya aired footage, including video of a man repeatedly banging his head against a wall, photos of a hooded man in his underwear and of a naked figure lying on the floor next to what appeared to be a pool of blood.

Other pictures shown on the SBS current affairs programme Dateline included those of a man whose throat had apparently been slit, a group of men being forced to masturbate in front of guards, photographs of bloodied Iraqis who had been shot and prisoners with burns and weeping wounds.

Although just a handful of the images were leaked in 2004, causing perhaps the worst US public relations disaster since the invasion of Iraq, hundreds more have been kept secret by the Pentagon.

They are now the subject of legal battle in the US. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued for their release, and the matter is before the courts. A spokesman for Dateline declined to say how the programme had obtained the images but said that SBS was “confident in the credibility of the source”. A Pentagon official confirmed last night that the images were authentic.

Nine American soldiers — all low-ranking Reservists — have been convicted in connection with the abuse and received sentences ranging from discharge from the Army to ten years’ imprisonment.

Labeed Abbawi, an adviser to Iraq’s Foreign Minister, condemned the images, but said: “I feel bringing up these issues is only going to add heat to an already fragile situation in Iraq and they don’t help anybody.” Gerald Butt, editor of the Middle East Economic Survey, said: “Each time something like this appears it makes Arabs doubt what America’s true motives are and makes them look more and more like a colonial power.”

But in Baghdad there was little surprise. “Nothing is new to us,” Muhammad Shati, 34, a Baghdad telecom engineer, told The Times. “Those are the Americans we know already. They should stop giving speeches on fighting for freedom: an army of terror cannot defeat terror.”

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