The United States military will close Abu Ghraib prison within three months, a military spokesman said today.

"We will transfer operations from Abu Ghraib to the new Camp Cropper once construction is completed there," Lieutenant Colonel Keir-Kevin Curry told the Reuters news agency.

"No precise dates have been set, but the plan is to accomplish this within the next two to three months," said Lt-Col Curry, the spokesman for American detention operations in Iraq.

Camp Cropper is a detention facility in the US military headquarters base at Baghdad airport, not far from Abu Ghraib. It currently houses around 4,500 prisoners including 127 "high-value" detainees, among them Saddam Hussein.

American military officials say a purpose-built prison at Camp Cropper will provide better conditions for Iraqis detained on suspicion of insurgent activity.

The buildings at Abu Ghraib, including the original brick-built jail and surrounding tented camp that has sprung up under US control, will be handed over to the Iraqi government.

American forces are holding 14,589 people in four jails in Iraq. More than half are at Camp Bucca, in the south.

Abu Ghraib, in western Baghdad, was a torture centre under Saddam Hussein where up to 4,000 prisoners are thought to have been executed in 1984 alone. It earned fresh notoriety following the publication of shocking photographs of American soldiers abusing Iraqis there in 2003.

In a report leaked in April, 2004, Major General Antonia Taguba of the US Army concluded that soldiers had committed "egregrious acts and grave breaches of law". He reported "sadistic, blatant and wanton ciminal abuses" of prisoners.

The most notorious case was that of Private Lynddie England who was jailed for three years after a picture of her holding a naked inmate on a dog lead was circulated around the world.

The subsequent political scandal caused tremendous damage to the public image of the coalition forces, with critics arguing that it was representative of a broader American attitude towards Iraqis.

Thousands of people are held on suspicion of guerrilla activity for many months. The United Nations and Iraqi ministers have complained that the system is an abuse of human rights.

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