CAIRO. Nov 10: Iraq has executed 125 political prisoners arrested during and after a failed uprising in southern Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War. a human rights group said Tuesday. reports AP.

The executions, which included those of three Egyptians, took place in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad in early October, the Londonbased Center for Human Rights of the Iraqi Communist Party said in a statement.

The group listed the names of the executed prisoners, which included 29 military men, some in the elite Republican Guards and the Iraqi air force.

The others, it said, are mostly from the southern Shi'ite Muslim towns or Kurds from the north. Southern Shi'ites and Kurds staged an unsuccessful uprising against President Saddam Hussein's regime after the Gulf War.

In a statement faxed to The Associated Press in Cairo, the human rights group listed the names of two colonels, one lieutenant colonel and a major in the Republican Guards. It gave the names of 13 Iraqi air force officers with ranks up to lieutenant colonel.

The group said the three Egyptians were executed for "supplying information to an enemy country."

There was no way to independently confirm the report.

There have been repeated reports of executions and widespread arrests by Saddam's regime to silence its opponents.

In April, the UN human rights commissioner responsible for Iraq, former Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel. said as many as 1,500 people may have been executed in Iraqi prisons and elsewhere lastyear.

"The new massacre is another chain in a series of executions and mass killings which the ruling regime started since last autumn in what it termed the campaign for cleansing the prisons." the group said Tuesday.

Labour minister. Abdel-Aziz Mohammad Saleh al-Sayegh. in the first public admission of prison overcrowding, told a Baghdad newspaper in March that Iraqi prisons hold five times their capacity of inmates. Al-Sayegh was fired by Saddam on May 11 with no reason given.

The London-based group also said another Egyptian. Hamed Marai Abdel-Aziz, is waiting a similar fate in cell number 31 in the prison.

Prison authorities have handed the bodies of only three high-ranking officers to their families for burial, while the rest were buried by the Abu Ghraib municipality in a mass grave on October 8 near a dairy sactory, the statement said.