At the small, crowded prisoner-tracking department of the Ministry of Human Rights (MOHR), tears often flow freely.

"He was arrested from his house on December 25," sobs Jameela Abdullah Hikmet, who was looking for her brother, Jameel Abdullah Hikmet.

With thousands of Iraqis kidnapped and arrested over the past three years, often in murky circumstances, the MOHR has become one more place Iraqis look for missing relatives. More than 34,000 Iraqis, according to MOHR figures, are held at one of the dozens of prisons across the country run by either the US military or the Iraqi Ministries of Interior, Defense, and Justice.

The system has become more organized in recent months, but prisoners are still "lost," says one Iraqi official.Ms. Hikmet says she visited morgues first, believing initially that her brother had been taken by men posing as government officials.

Hikmet says she then visited dozens of prisons before she was told by an official at the Ministry of Interior (MOI) that her brother was being held by the Wolf Brigade, one of the ministry's elite police units. She was then sent to the MOHR, which tracks prisoners in the US military and Iraqi detention systems centrally. She has been coming to the MOHR for two weeks, but they can still not confirm that it is the MOI that is holding her brother.

Even for prisoners who can be located, families often face confusing circumstances and long waits before legal proceedings take place. As the US military has tried to turn over more responsibilities to the Iraqi government since 2004, some prisoners have been transferred multiple times.

Fayyez Daoud has been in Iraqi or US custody for more than a year without charges. His family says that he was mistakenly arrested after being injured in crossfire during a tribal dispute in March 2005 near his home in Haswa, one of the capital's western suburbs.

His family says that he was first in the custody of the Iraqi National Guard (ING), then the US. Then, they say, he was moved back into Iraqi custody after the US military pulled out of their base in Haswa, leaving it under the control of the ING. Now he is in a Ministry of Defense (MOD) prison, the MOHR says.

Last month, his family received a letter from Mr. Daoud via MOHR. It read, in part: "I have decided to commit suicide, because it is the only solution available. These people want us to die in prison of broken hearts. If slow death is our destiny, why shouldn't we speed it up?"

MOHR and US officials both say that they are working to speed up the process for trying and releasing detainees. International human rights groups have reported that some prisoners have been held as long as two years without due process. Daoud's lawyers, who have also represented other prisoners, accuse the MOD and MOI of stalling cases.

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