Washington: With the Bush administration struggling to clarify its position on the prisoners abuse issue, more photographs of maltreatment of Iraqi inmates by US jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison have turned up.

The photos are among 1,000 digital pictures passed around among US military police who served at the prison and show similar acts of abuse and humiliation of prisoners, which triggered a major controversy.

The photographs taken from the summer of 2003 through the winter, ranges widely, from mundane images of everyday military life to pictures showing crude simulations of sex, the 'Washington Post' said.

The new pictures appear to show American soldiers abusing prisoners, many of them wearing ID bands, but the paper said it could not eliminate the possibility that some of them were staged.

While one picture depicts a soldier holding a leash tied around a naked prisoner writhing on the ground, another shows a group of three or four naked prisoners tied together on the ground outside their cells with US troops around them.

Other photographs include a naked prisoner wearing a black pointed hood and another handcuffed naked man with a pair of women's underwear covering his head.

The images were among those seized by military investigators probing conditions at the prison, it added.

In a damage control exercise over the abuse issue, President George W Bush had yesterday (May 5, 2004) told the Arab world that the treatment of prisoners by some US military men was "abhorrent" and there "will be investigations".