Iraqi cells disgorge dark secrets

"This is the office where they interrogated me in 1996 with electric shock," he says, shaking his head in disbelief. "I was prisoner No. 726. It was all because they believed I had worked for the CIA, but their entire case was based on the fact that I had a good friend who worked for a Christian organization. They beat me with metal cables, shocked me with military telephone sets, and pulled out my fingernails."

"Many of the prisoners who were in with me vanished. We would see them one day and then the next they would be gone. It wasn't clear if they had been transferred or just executed and dumped in a mass grave somewhere in the desert. I still long to see some of my best friends alive."

Ismail Ibrahim Dialla said his father and four brothers had all fallen into the hands of Hussein's half-brother. Standing alongside him, Zahra Mahdi Hadi says she had come to find her son.

"We know they are in there," she says, pleading for entry. "People have heard cries at night from deep down in the ground both during the US bombing and since it ended."

A man who claimed he sold cigarettes outside the underground dungeon at Kadamiya said he could lead the relatives to the cells if the US soldiers would just let them through the gates they were guarding.

Iraqi police Col. Ahmed Zaki, who took up his old post again only a week after fleeing his offices, says that he had no idea where any missing Iraqi prisoners are. "They certainly weren't being held by the Ministry of the Interior," he says as he starts his work as a chief of joint US-Iraqi street patrols in Baghdad. "I wouldn't rule out the possibility that some of these prisoners are still inside military intelligence prisons."

A US Marine Corps major, John Secass, insists, however, that his men have still found no secret passageways at Kadamiya, a facility for political and religious prisoners with a 5000-inmate capacity. "I can tell you we are looking, but we have come up entirely empty so far," he says, standing with a platoon of fighters behind a barbed-wire fence in a palm grove.

Likewise, at the city's main presidential palace complex, across the Tigris River from the Palestine Hotel, Army Lt. Christian Laughlin from Richmond, Va., said that a special team of scouts from the Army's 3rd Division were hunting the grounds for underground passageways.

He said that, thus far, the US forces had found only military bunkers.

Fellow soldiers displayed an extraordinary Iraqi arms cache Tuesday, including a gold-plated Heckler-Koch machine gun discovered in a presidential palace.

In addition, US Army Capt. Jim Ahearn displayed 20 custom-made briefcases. Each concealed a Heckler-Koch submachine-gun capable of being fired by a secret trigger on the outside handle of the case.

"You see, you just walk with this thing down a busy street in a business suit swinging the briefcase in your hand and squeeze the trigger," he said. "This is a gun used for one thing and one thing only - terror."

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