30,000 prisoners in Iraq without trial: Amnesty

CAIRO - Iraqi authorities are holding some 30,000 people without trial and denying them access to lawyers, leaving them at risk of torture, the leading human rights organisation Amnesty International said Monday in a report.

Secret prisons are allegedly being used to house detainees. The report - entitled New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful detentions and torture in Iraq - also charged that some prisoners had died from maltreatment while in custody.

Amnesty’s rights expert on Iraq, Carsten Jurgensen, noted that around 10,000 detainees were at an increased risk of abuse after the US handed them over to Iraqi authorities.

The report alleged that prisoners were beaten with electric cables and tortured with electric shocks and drills.

It also pointed to cases of long-term detention and torture in the northern autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq.