WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 (Xinhuanet) -- The United States has expanded its probe into alleged tortures and other abuses in detention sites run by Iraqi security forces, US media reported Friday.

    Officials from US law-enforcement agencies, the US embassy in Baghdad, and the US military will join the investigation, which was expanded to cover all of more than 1,100 Iraq-run prisons across the country.

    US officials said the Iraqi government has agreed on a six-point plan intended to "ensure humane treatment of all detainees" held in those sites.

    The move followed last weekend's discovery of 173 detainees -- mostly Sunnis and many of them held for months -- in a bunker of an Iraqi Interior Ministry building by US troops.

    The detainees in the bunker gave various accounts of bloody beatings, torture with electric shock and, in one case, being suspended from the ceiling in chains.

    A US journalist said he saw emaciated men being taken from the bunker, and an Iraqi Interior Minister official said the skin of some detainees had been stripped off.

    US Army Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who oversees training of Iraq's security forces, said the prison case "points out the necessity for an internal oversight that clearly isn't there" for everyone taken into custody by Iraq's security and intelligence services.

    "These kinds of things are a huge detriment to the morale of the (Iraqi) force," Dempsey said.

    US media said the US government's emphasis on the investigationshows the gravity with which US leaders viewed the scandal's possible impact on the already marginalized Iraqi Sunni community,whose support is vital to ending the insurgency. Enditem