Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse (Click Here for Image Slide Show from ABC)

That is me under the hood,’ said Hayder

‘We were not terrorists, just ordinary people. And they knew that’

The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd feels he cannot move back to his old neighbourhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.

‘‘That is Joiner,’’ he said, pointing at one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and bright blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.

‘‘That is Miss Maya,’’ he said, pointing to a young woman’s fresh face poking up over the same pile.

He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a toothy ‘‘thumbs up’’ and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing only a black hood. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner. ‘‘That is me,’’ he said.

Abd, 34, is at the centre of an explosive scandal over American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. In a detailed, two-hour account of his time at the Abu Ghraib prison, he claimed he was never interrogated and never charged with a crime. Officials at the prison on Tuesday said they could not comment on his case.

‘‘We were not terrorists,’’ Abd said. ‘‘We were not insurgents. We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew this.’’

Abd spoke with no particular anger at the US occupation. In six months in prisons run by US soldiers, in fact, he said, most of them treated him well and with respect. That changed in November when punishment for a prisoner fight at Abu Ghraib degenerated into torture. That night, he said, he and six other inmates were beaten, stripped naked, forced to pile on top of each other, to straddle each others’ backs naked, to simulate oral sex. American guards wrote words like ‘‘rapist’’ on their skin in Magic Marker.

The curiosity was the camera. It was a detail he mentioned repeatedly as he recalled being forced against a wall and ordered to masturbate as he looked at a female guard.

‘‘It was humiliating,’’ Abd said in Arabic through an interpreter. ‘‘We did not think that we would survive. All of us believed we would be killed.’’

The details of Abd’s account could not be verified. But a military official here said that the prisoner number that Abd gave, 13077, matches that of a former prisoner who submitted a sworn statement alleging abuse by US soldiers. He also said that the man’s account was consistent with those verified by a military investigator. Several episodes that Abd recounted also matched, in some detail, testimony given by other US soldiers horrified by what they saw.