'I thought they'd kill me'

The photograph - seen the world over - showed a leering US guard pointing at the genitals of a hooded and humiliated Iraqi prisoner.

"That is me," said Hayder Sabbar Abd, pointing at the picture, one of a set which has done so much to damage the US army's reputation. Mr Abd recognised himself from the small scars on the pictured man's torso and has now come forward to denounce the behaviour of his tormentors.

Shown the photog raphs of the degradation, the memories of his days at Abu Ghraib prison come flooding back. "It was humiliating. We did not think that we would survive. All of us believed we would be killed and not get out alive," he said.

Mr Abd, 34, a Shia Muslim from Nasiriyah, said the abuse began last November. He and six other detainees were beaten, stripped, forced to pile on top of each other and simulate-oral sex. The allegations have been substantiated by the devastating report into abuse at the prison by US army major-general Antonio Taguba.

Soldiers have testified in sworn statements that this was done to men like Mr Abd. At one stage Mr Abd - prisoner No. 13077 - was forced against a wall and ordered by the Arabic translator to masturbate as he looked at one of the female guards.

The father of five, who served for 18 years in the Iraqi army, said: "She was laughing. Of course I couldn't do it. I told them I couldn't, so they beat me in the stomach and I fell to the ground. The translator said, 'Do it! Do it! It's better than being beaten.' I said 'How can I do it'?" Mr Abd says he received more than 50 blows over the two-hour ordeal. His jaw was broken and he still has trouble eating.

Throughout the ordeal the guards took photographs, trophies of their handiwork. Now, using those photographs, Mr Abd is able to identify his tormentors.

"That is Joiner," he says, pointing at a grinning US soldier in glasses and blue rubber gloves giving the thumbs-up sign as in front of him naked, hooded detainees are piled into a writhing pyramid. Peeking out from behind the bodies is the smiling face of a woman soldier. "That is Miss Maya," says Mr Abd.

The soldier photographed pointing at Mr Abd's genitals has since been identified as Private Lynndie England, the gloved soldier as Specialist Charles Granier, of the 372nd Military Police Company.

Mr Abd said: "In my pocket I had three cigarettes. Joiner said to me 'Put them in your mouth and smoke all of them. If one falls out of your mouth I will crush you with my boot'."

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