US MILITARY commanders will not hand over prisons or detainees to the Iraqi Government until it begins treating prisoners better, officials in Baghdad said yesterday.

The decision comes after Sunni protests that inmates are tortured in prisons run by the Shia-led Interior Ministry, and the discovery of 120 beaten detainees in two jails this month.

Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson said that detention facilities will be transferred over time but human rights and international law had to be followed. Colonel Johnson, a military spokesman, said: “The transition will be based on meeting standards, not on a timeline.”

The decision comes weeks after a public plea by Fallujah city council officials to Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, for Sunni detainees to be held in US prisons, not Iraqi ones.

Despite the US abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Fallujah officials said that they feared Sunnis were disappearing into Interior Ministry facilities never to be seen again.

Insurgents stepped up their violence yesterday, killing at least 20 people in and around Baghdad. The victims included one US and five Iraqi soldiers and six Iraqi police.

A Shia politician was murdered and a provincial governor narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. As the violence increased, the lawyer for Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s half-brother and co-defendant, claimed that US officials had offered him a “political” post in exchange for testimony against the former dictator. Khalil al-Dulaimi, a defence lawyer, told the Jordanian al-Arab al-Yawm news- paper that the former secret police chief was tortured after saying that he would “never betray” his eldest brother.

The US has repeatedly denied harming Saddam. Iraqi judges said that none of the eight murder defendants had complained of mistreatment.

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