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Sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners continued at least three months after the Abu Ghraib scandal was revealed, according to accounts by alleged victims published in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine. In a report on 60 hours of interviews Vanity Fair writer Donovan Webster conducted with 10 former detainees, he quoted several accounts of mistreatment that included Iraqi prisoners being sexually assaulted by American soldiers or being hooded, beaten, subjected to electric shock and kept in cages or crates. One man said he was hung naked from handcuffs in a frigid room while soldiers threw buckets of ice water on him. Mr Webster added that several of the people he interviewed said their mistreatment took place in July, three months after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal broke in late April. The article said the former detainees interviewed by Mr Webster are suing two American companies that provided translators and interrogators to forces in Iraq and their first-hand accounts comprise "hundreds, if not thousands, of separate Geneva Convention violations". The magazine said the accounts of abuses were impossible to independently verify. It also quoted a US military spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq as dismissing the assertions that prisoners were held illegally, kept in wooden boxes, handcuffed and blindfolded and subjected to sexual threats, abuse and assault. In one example cited in the article, a 15-year-old Iraqi identified only as N said he was pulled from a wooden crate he had been forced to crouch inside, wearing handcuffs and blacked-out ski goggles, for 11 days and taken to the bathroom against his will where he was sexually assaulted. [more]