The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said today it had repeatedly urged the United States to take "corrective action" at a Baghdad jail that is at the centre of a scandal over Iraqi prisoner abuse.
The Geneva-based humanitarian agency, mandated under international treaties to visit detainees, has had regular access to Abu Ghraib prison since US-led occupation forces began using it last year, according to chief spokeswoman Ms Antonella Notari.
She declined to give details of what the ICRC had seen during the visits, which take place every five to six weeks, or about its reports to the US authorities.
The ICRC keeps a public silence about what it hears from detainees as the price for gaining access to jails in trouble spots around the world from Chechnya to west Africa.
Pictures of grinning US soldiers abusing naked Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, Iraq's largest prison and notorious under Saddam Hussein for torture, have triggered an international outcry.
In a bid to limit the damage to America's image, US President George W. Bush went on two Arabic satellite television stations yesterday to tell an outraged Middle East that soldiers guilty of abusing Iraqi prisoners would be punished.
The ICRC has also visited thousands of prisoners under the control of US and British forces, which are also being investigated after a British daily published pictures of a soldier allegedly urinating on an Iraqi detainee. Ms Notari declined any comment on what its officials had seen in British-run jails.
Under the Geneva Conventions on both prisoners and the treatment of civilians in wartime, the ICRC must be allowed to interview detainees in private and on a regular basis.
On these terms, it has twice visited Saddam Hussein, who is being held somewhere in Iraq since his capture by US troops shortly before Christmas.