BAGHDAD: An official at a northern Iraq prison says medical staff held a protest, saying they didn’t have enough medical supplies to treat prisoners and demanding more pay.

Bakir Hama, a senior medical official at the hospital, said that 50 medical employees at Chamchamal federal prison protested on Thursday.  He said the staff complained about the lack of medical supplies and medicine to treat sick prisoners.

He said the staff is also not receiving extra pay that they used to receive for working in dangerous situations. Chamchamal is located about 50 kilometers south of the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. The prison houses 2,500 prisoners.

Human rights groups have criticised Iraq for its treatment of prisoners saying the prison inmates have sometimes been abused.

Last week a spokesman said Iraq’s Justice Ministry will shut down a Green Zone prison where human rights watchdogs believe inmates have been abused.

Justice spokesman Haidar Al Saadi said that top Iraqi officials have been investigating prisoners’ living conditions over the last month.

As a result, Al Saadi said the detention centre known as “Camp Honour” in the Green Zone would be closed. He said the centre’s prisoners would be distributed among other Iraqi prisons.

In a report last month, New York-based Human Rights Watch quoted prisoners at Camp Honour who described the use of torture during interrogations and described cells “so crowded that we had to take turns standing and lying down.”

Hundreds gathered to demand the resignation of President Jalal Talabani after he described an ethnically mixed city in Iraq’s north as Jerusalem for Kurds — suggesting they must fight to keep the city in the semiautonomous Kurdistan region, rather than leaving it to rule by the majority-Arab Baghdad.

“I don’t want to fight my Iraqi brothers over land that we have all owned for thousands of years,” car salesman Taha Hassan Ahmed said at the gathering in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square where hundreds of supporters signed petitions demanding Talabani’s resignation. “Destabilising Iraq will not serve Iraqis,” he said. “It will only serve the politicians who are acting as lords of war.”