General claims 80% of prisoners released from US-run Camp Bucca have rejoined terrorists. Iraqi security chiefs are blaming a big rise in violence this year on detainees released from the contentious American prison system who used their time in custody to appoint new leaders and plot mayhem after their release. Interviews of military and police officials throughout Baghdad and the increasingly restive areas of Anbar and Diyala have painted a picture of a country that is again nearing a tipping point, with security officers and checkpoints under almost daily attack from a revitalised Sunni insurgency that gathered steam behind the walls of the two US prisons in Iraq. The scenario is in sharp contrast to a US military assessment, which last year claimed that only 4% of the 88,000 detainees held since 2003 have been accused of committing new crimes after their release. Major General Ahmed Obeidi al-Saedi, who leads the sixth division of the Iraqi army in south and west Baghdad, claims as many as 80% of detainees have either aligned, or realigned with militant groups, mostly to al-Qaida in Iraq, or its affiliates. He said 86 former inmates of the US prisons, known as Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca, have been rearrested since 10 March. "I say to you emphatically that 80% who have been released from Bucca have returned to work with the terrorists and have in fact become stronger," said General Saedi, whose area of command has been increasingly under attack over the past two months. "We ask them, did they finish their time in prison rehabilitated psychologically and they say 'no, it was the perfect environment to reorganise al-Qaida'." Authorities have become increasingly concerned at the type of recent violence, as much as the rising number of attacks, with numerous cases of families being killed in areas that three years ago were seen as lost causes. Some of the carnage has stirred ghosts of the same lethal and lawless period at a time when the security gains of the past two years are being undermined by a lingering political vacuum. Last week, in a village in the Diyala province, 60 miles north of Baghdad, a76-year-old Shia, Abdullah Jassim Shakour, was beheaded in his home. Three days earlier he had spoken out against a resurgent al-Qaida presence. In the Diyala police station that has detained one of the alleged killers, Captain Aamar Ahmed confirmed he recently had been released from US custody. "I can tell you that 100%," he said. "He had not been out of prison long. There are many others like him." A second man, Yassir Sami, also a former US detainee, was then presented. He was released in early 2009 after being picked up during a US security sweep and has since allegedly confessed to a role in the first of a series of al-Qaida bombings that destroyed the foreign and finance ministries in Baghdad on 19 August last year. Of greater concern to Iraqi authorities are revelations that the men accused of being the principals behind the August blasts and the four waves of savage attacks that followed, are also US prison veterans. One of them, Munaf Abdul-Rahim al-Rawi, has told his jailers that much of the key planning behind the carnage was done in prison. "He said 'we appointed our leaders inside Bucca'," said Saedi. "It was a very useful time for them. "The head of finance for al-Qaida, Ali Naema al-Salmoon, was also in there with him. We caught him two weeks ago and he had been funding the bombings ever since he was released in 2009." The US is handing over the last of its two prisons to the Iraqi government. Camp Bucca in southern Iraq closed last August and Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, is now down to 3,000 inmates. At their peak, the two prisons held as many as 25,000 detainees. An adviser to Major General Nelson Cannon, deputy commander of the US detention programme said all US detainees were first handed over to Iraqi authorities before being freed. "All of them are then being released by the Iraqi government on the strength of the cases against them," he said. "We are constantly asking Iraqi parliamentarians or leaders to visit our processing centre and understand how we do things. It is very easy to blame the American side, but there are two parties involved and the Iraqis are heavily consulted."