US military pulls plug on largest prison in Iraq

The American army has decided to shut down Camp Bucca in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra as it moves to release thousands or transfer them to Iraqi custody before the year end.

All the remaining 180 detainees of the facility, located just north of the Kuwaiti border, were transferred to US military's two remaining detention facilities -- Camp Taji and Camp Cropper, just outside Baghdad.

The isolated Camp Bucca began as a small tent camp for prisoners of war just after the US-led 2003 invasion. Over the next six years, it grew into a 40-acre desert prison filled with row after row of watchtowers, barbed-wire-topped fences and metal trailers or plywood barracks to house detainees.

Named after Ronald Bucca, a former Green Beret and New York City fire Marshall, killed in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the camp was the target of abuse allegations from detainees and human rights groups following the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The US military is apparently racing to empty its detention facilities because a security pact that went into effect in January requires them to either transfer detainees to Iraqi custody for prosecution or to release them.

This is while Iraqi officials say they have evidence that some released detainees are returning to violence, either in insurgent groups or in criminal gangs that have unleashed a frenzy of crimes in the Iraqi capital.

A senior Iraqi investigator looking into the truck bombings that killed around 100 people last month outside the foreign and finance ministries in Baghdad said the man who carried out one the attacks was a former detainee at Camp Bucca.

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