Abu Ghraib is consigned to the past as US returns prison to Iraqi control

The notoriety of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison - a byword for torture under both Saddam Hussein's regime and the US occupation - was definitively consigned to the past yesterday as the American military transferred the now-empty complex to Iraqi government control.

"Now the prison is protected by Iraqi forces, and the Iraqi government will look into how to benefit from it in the national interest," a government spokesman told a Baghdad news conference. Abu Ghraib, located 20 miles west of the capital, is not expected to be used as a prison ever again.

US authorities have been slowly moving towards closing the prison ever since images of army reservists taunting, humiliating and threatening naked inmates first became public more than two years ago. As of the beginning of this year, the vast complex still contained about 4,500 prisoners. Roughly 2,000 of those were released under a national reconciliation plan enacted in June by Iraq's Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. The rest have been transferred to a new US military detention centre called Camp Cropper.

Abu Ghraib, made up of five separate walled compounds, was built by British contractors in the 1960s and soon became a symbol of Saddam's repressive regime. Prisoners were often tortured and thousands were hanged, including the British journalist Farzad Bazoft, who was accused of spying while on a reporting trip for The Observer in 1990.

The US military took over the facility after the 2003 invasion and attempted to give it a more benign name, the Baghdad Central Correctional Facility. Within months, however, the prison once again became associated with abusive treatment - as documented by the Red Cross, internal Pentagon investigations and, ultimately, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker who first made the abuses public. According to these reports, prisoners in US custody were sodomised with sticks, mauled by dogs and beaten to death.

Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, ascribed the mistreatment to "a few bad apples". The military staged a series of courts martial targeting only the reservists. Specialist Charles Graner, identified as the ringleader who arranged the naked prisoners in pyramids and hooked them to electrodes, was sentenced to 10 years. Private Lynndie England, Graner's girlfriend, received a three-year sentence and a dishonourable discharge. She has since given birth to a son, believed to be Graner's, who is being raised by her parents pending her release.

The top military commander at Abu Ghraib after the invasion, Brigadier General Janis Karpinksi, was demoted to colonel but otherwise went unpunished. Col Karpinksi alleged that the abuses were orchestrated by US army intelligence officers and private government contractors, over whom she had no control. She accused the Pentagon of scapegoating her to deflect attention from its own responsibilities.