BAGHDAD — Iraq’s justice minister says authorities have closed down a notorious prison west of Baghdad over security concerns.



Hassan Al-Shimmari said on Tuesday that 2,400 inmates have been transferred from Abu Ghraib to other prisons in safer areas of the country. He says it was a precautionary measure because the Abu Ghraib facility is located in “a restive area.”



The prison is at the edge of the Sunni-dominated Anbar province. Last July, militants attacked Abu Ghraib and another prison, setting free hundreds of inmates, including many militants. Dozens of other inmates and security personnel were killed in the attack. Under US troops, Abu Ghraib was at the center of a 2004 scandal over detainee abuse.



From late 2003 to early 2004, during the Iraq War, military police personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed human rights violations against prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison. They physically and sexually abused, tortured, raped, sodomized, and killed prisoners. It came to public attention in early 2004, beginning with United States Department of Defense announcements.  As revealed in the Taguba Report (2004), an initial criminal investigation by the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command had already been underway, in which soldiers of the 320th Military Police Battalion had been charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with prisoner abuse.



In April 2004, articles describing the abuse, including pictures showing military personnel appearing to abuse prisoners, came to wide public attention when a 60 Minutes II news report (April 28) and an article by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker magazine (posted online on April 30 and published days later in the May 10 issue) reported the story.  The United States Department of Defense removed seventeen soldiers and officers from duty, and eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery.



Between May 2004 and March 2006, eleven soldiers were convicted in courts-martial, sentenced to military prison, and dishonorably discharged from service.



Meanwhile, militants have closed all gates of a Euphrates River dam they control in Iraq, blocking a major water source, a minister said on Monday, while violence killed 15 people.



The latest unrest comes amid a protracted surge in nationwide bloodshed that has claimed more than 2,550 lives so far this year and sparked fears of Iraq slipping back into the all-out sectarian killings of 2006 and 2007.



The unrest has been driven principally by widespread anger among the Sunni Arab minority over claims of mistreatment at the hands of the Shiite-led government and security forces, as well as by the civil war in neighbouring Syria.



Militants have “completely closed the gates of the Falluja dam since Sunday morning,” Water Resources Minister Muhanad Al-Saadi said in a statement. The move blocks a major source of water for central and southern Iraq. The militants, who seized the dam several weeks ago, had previously cut the flow of water through the dam near the city of Falluja, just a short drive west of Baghdad, but reopened it when water accumulated and caused the area to flood.



In a sign of both the reach of anti-government fighters and the weakness of security forces, all of Falluja and shifting parts of Anbar provincial capital Ramadi, to its west, have been out of government control since early January. – Agencies