A total of 27 US military intelligence personnel were involved in abusing Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, military investigators said Wednesday.

"We discovered serious misconduct and a loss of moral values," General Paul Kern, head of an investigation on the role of military intelligence officers in the abuses, said at a Pentagon news briefing.

With respect to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which was responsible for the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, Kern said the investigators found that 23 military personnel and four contractors were associated with the abuses.

In addition, six military intelligence personnel and two contractor saw the abuses but failed to report, he said.

For non-military intelligence personnel, he said, there were seven military police previously charged, and three more for abuse and one for failure to report. In the medical category, two were found to have witnessed abuses but failed to report.

In total, 44 people were discovered to be associated with the abuses, with some involved in more than one instance, Kern said.

The investigators also found and documented the cases of eight "ghost detainees," people who were brought to the facilities but were not recorded, he said.

"There was no single cause. There were contributing factors and the direct result, however, were individual misconduct, a lack of discipline and a lack of leadership," he said.

The summary of the investigation blamed the abuses on several factors: misconduct by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians, a lack of discipline on the part of leaders and soldiers, and a failure or lack of leadership by higher command inIraq.

It also attributed some of the problems to the influence of officials with other government agencies. "It is clear that the interrogation practices of other government agencies led to a lossof accountability at Abu Ghraib," the summary said.

During its investigation, Kern said, his team collected, catalogued and archived into a database over 9,000 documents, and conducted interviews with more than 170 people.

On Tuesday, a four-member military investigation panel releaseda report that faulted higher levels of command for the abuse scandal in the Abu Ghraib.

The panel, led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, blamed in its report senior leaders, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers, for lax oversight and inattention to the issue of military-run prisons in Iraq.

Schlesinger said there were 300 cases of abuses being investigated, many of them outside Abu Ghraib. "So the abuses werenot limited to a few individuals."

Source: Xinhua