BAGHDAD, Iraq — New images of naked prisoners, some bloodied and lying on the floor, threatened to revive public anger over abuse by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib prison at a time when tensions with the West are already running high in the Middle East.

The images were taken about the same time as the earlier photos three years ago that triggered a worldwide scandal and led to military trials and prison sentences for several lower-ranking American soldiers. Some key Iraqi officials urged their countrymen to react calmly since the pictures were old and the offenders had been punished.

Iraq's prime minister today condemned the new images of abuse, but noted that those responsible had already been punished.

Many of the pictures broadcast Wednesday by Australia's Special Broadcasting Service, including some that appear to show corpses, were more graphic than those previously published. One of the video clips depicted a group of naked men with bags over their heads standing together and masturbating. The network said the men were forced to participate.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq's Interior Ministry has launched an investigation into claims that a police death squad has been operating in the country, a top official said today.The investigation into the death squads was announced as police found the bodies of 10 more men who had been shot execution-style and dumped in three different areas of Baghdad's Shiite suburb of Shula.Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, Iraq's deputy interior minister in charge of domestic intelligence, said the investigation followed U.S. military claims that soldiers had detained 22 Iraqi men wearing police uniforms who were about to kill a Sunni Arab last month."We have been informed about this and the interior minister has formed an investigation committee to learn more about the Sunni person and those 22 men, particularly whether they work for the Interior Ministry or claim to belong to the ministry," Kamal said.A U.S. general said American forces had found evidence of a death squad operating in Iraq's Interior Ministry, the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday. Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who commands the civilian police training teams in Iraq, said the men were employed by the Interior Ministry as highway patrol officers.

NEW YORK — Saddam Hussein told aides in the mid-1990s that he warned the United States it could be hit by a terrorist attack, ABC News reported Wednesday, citing 12 hours of tapes the network obtained of the former Iraqi dictator's talks with his Cabinet.One of Saddam's son-in-laws also explained how Iraq hid its biological weapons programs from U.N. inspectors, according to the tapes from August 1995.The coming terrorist attack Saddam predicted could involve weapons of mass destruction."Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans," Saddam is heard saying, adding he "told the British as well.""In the future, what would prevent a booby trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?" Saddam said.But he insisted Iraq would never launch such an attack. "This story is coming, but not from Iraq," he said.The State Department had no comment on the report, which aired on "World News Tonight." ABC News said U.S. officials confirmed the tapes were authentic.ABC News said the CIA found the tapes in Iraq and that the 12 hours were provided to it by Bill Tierney, a former member of a U.N. inspection team who was translating them for the FBI.Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told Saddam on the tape that "the biological (attack) is very easy to make. It's so simple that any biologist can make a bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and kill 100,000.""This is not done by a state. No need to accuse a state. An individual can do it," he said.Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam's, who was then in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction efforts, explained how Iraq held back information from the U.N. inspectors."We did not reveal all that we have," he said. "We did not reveal the volume of chemical weapons we had produced."