The deaths of two prisoners in Afghanistan in December 2002 were caused by sustained assaults by American soldiers, according to US Army criminal investigative reports that have not yet been made public.

The two prisoners were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers, The New York Times reported Saturday, quoting the Army's investigative reports.

One soldier, Willie V. Brand, who acknowledged striking a detainee named Dilawar 37 times, was charged with manslaughter in a closed hearing last month in Texas in connection with one of the deaths. He was accused of having maimed and killed Dilawar over a five-day period by "destroying his leg muscle tissue with repeated unlawful knee strikes."

The attacks on Dilawar were so severe that "even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated," the newspaper quoted the Army reports as saying.

The reports, obtained by Human Rights Watch, provide the first official account of events that led to the deaths of the detainees, Mullah Habibullah and Dilawar, at the Bagram Control Point, about 65 km miles north of Kabul, the Afghan capital. The deaths took place nearly a year before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

American military officials in Afghanistan initially said the deaths of Habibullah, in an isolation cell in December 2002, and Dilawar, in another such cell six days later, were from natural causes, but after an investigation by The New York Times, the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides.

Last fall, Army investigators implicated 28 soldiers and reservists and recommended that they face criminal charges, including negligent homicide, but so far only Brand, a military policeman from the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cincinnati, and James P. Boland, from the same unit, have been charged, the newspaper said.

Among those implicated in the killings at Bagram were members of Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The battalion went on to Iraq, where some members established the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib and have been implicated in some abuses there.

John Sifton, a researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, was quoted as saying the documents substantiated the group's own investigations showing that beatings and stress positions were widely used, and that "far from a few isolated cases, abuse at sites in Afghanistan was common in 2002, the rule more than the exception."

Xinhua