HUMAN RIGHTS organisations expressed increasing concern yesterday over the treatment of the captured Iraqis on the American “deck-of-cards” list of most-wanted regime members.

Their intervention came after the detention of three more senior officials on Wednesday, including the former chief of military intelligence and the former head of the country’s military air defences. Their arrests brought the total to 11, but the Bush Administration is refusing to disclose where or in what conditions they are being held.

The whereabouts of Abu Abbas, the Palestinian behind the 1985 hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro, who was arrested by US special forces in Baghdad last week, are also unknown.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is based in Geneva, said that it has been allowed to visit two of the 11, but had been told not to divulge where they were being detained.

ICRC sources said that the civilians arrested should be covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the military by the Third Geneva Convention. But there was considerable doubt over their present status. Amnesty International said that all the captives from the most-wanted list had to be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention to ensure that they were properly treated and not put under any “stressful duress”.

A Pentagon spokesman told The Times: “Their status is not yet determined, and their location is not being disclosed. It is still at an early stage and it has not yet been determined what will happen to them.”

A British Foreign Office official said that discussions were still going on with Washington about what to do with the captured Iraqis on the most-wanted list but no conclusions had been reached.

The ICRC said that every attempt was being made to visit all those Iraqi regime members captured by the Americans. A spokeswoman said: “Everyone wants to know where they are, but because they are such high-profile figures, we can’t even say where they are not being held.”

Legal sources said that Mr Abbas’s case was harder to deal with, although he could also benefit from the protection of the Geneva Convention because he was arrested during a war.

Amnesty International said: “We would be against any of the captives being sent outside Iraq to a detention camp such as the one at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or Bagram in Afghanistan.” Amnesty said that if the captured regime members were to be charged with war crimes or crimes against humanity, a United Nations committee of experts should be responsible for deciding how they should be tried.

That was what happened with indicted war criminals involved in the conflicts in the Balkans, leading to the setting-up of the independent International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

The Amnesty spokeswoman said: “The 11 regime members captured so far should all be held in a safe place and be allowed visits by the ICRC.”

The Red Cross and Amnesty fear that the Americans will decide to define those on the list of 55 as “unlawful combatants” which would put them outside the protection of international humanitarian law.

One legal expert said: “It is almost like a remake of history and international relations. Many human rights issues are being raised.”

The latest three detained from the deck-of-cards list yesterday were Zuhayr Talib Abd al-Sattar al-Naqib, who was head of military intelligence, Muzahim Sa’b Hassan al-Tikriti, air defence force commander, and Muhammad Mahdi al-Salih, Iraqi Minister of Trade.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, has indicated that Saddam Hussein and his senior henchmen should, if captured, be tried by Iraqi jurists, not by an international tribunal; and that those accused of war crimes in the recent conflict, as well as in the 1991 Gulf War, should be dealt with by American civilian or military courts.

Most ordinary Iraqis detained during the war, and formally designated as PoWs under the Geneva Convention, are still being held at the camp at Umm Qasr in southern Iraq.

The Red Cross said that they could not be released until the coalition declared a formal end of hostilities.

The Americans have released 927 PoWs, judged to have been non-combatants, leaving 6,850 in custody. The Kurds in the north who captured hundreds of Iraq troops, have so far released about 750.

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