The site is only one of dozens of prisons that have become shrines for Iraqis who for the first time can speak freely about Saddam's police state.

"That's where they hanged my two brothers and people are still trapped there in underground cells," said Qassem Magleh, 45, on a street corner in Haria, a Shiite neighborhood, where men and women hope desperately for news of family members taken away years ago by Saddam's secret police.

On Tuesday, the cemetery of the living stood empty -- its main building pulverised from the bombing campaign that paved the way for US troops to enter the city.

There were no signs of life. But across Baghdad, Iraqis flocked by the dozens to search the burnt and looted remains of Saddam's security apparatus.

They hoped to find a relative or stumble upon a passageway to the maze of prisons they believe lay hidden underground despite the insistence of US troops that no such dungeons exist.

Former inmates visited the dank chambers where they were beaten as if to prove to themselves Saddam's police state was a thing of the past.

In one such centre, a bare white building that served as an intelligence ministry prison and court, Akel Abdul Amir, 40, stood among 10 men who had come to visit their old cells and locate the subterranean prisons.

Amir, who spent 20 years in prison for belonging to the Dawa, an armed Shiite party, stared at the smashed out two-way mirror in an interrogation room and a splintered billy club that he said guards used to beat inmates.

Amir had already visited the cell three floors up where he said he had been kept in solitary confinement for a year.

"I don't know how I kept my sanity, it was a miracle," said Amir, whose grey hair and beard made him look far older than 40.

Amir, who was released last year, said he had come back because he wanted to find his sister's husband.

"I want people to know about those left underground. Why don't the Americans free those underground?" he pleaded.

"We are here because the regime took so many people. There are no bodies. We didn't get anything back. So people are here to know whether their son is dead. They want to know their son's fate."

Next to Amir, Radhah Hassan, 28, also Shiite, gripped a black and white snapshot of his father, a mustachioed man with slicked-back hair, thrown into prison in 1981.

"They jailed him because he was religious," Hassan said.

But like Amir he found nothing here other than cockroaches skittering across the cold cement floor.

Others returned because they felt lost outside the prison walls.

Faaz Salman, 30, released in October when Saddam issued a general amnesty to prisoners, rolled up his sleeves to reveal two long scars on his forearms and hundred of tiny cuts from his time behind bars.

Guards gave prisoners drugs and handed them razors to fight, he said.

"I am angry with myself because I still feel comfortable here. Freedom is strange," Salman said as he aimlessly wandered through the scorched hallways.

Some like Ghanem Al-Hamdi strode through the corridors like it was a victory march.

Al-Hamdi, who says he was picked up in 1998 under suspicion of trying to shoot Saddam's son Uday, picked a stale bread roll off the ground and recalled they would receive only two rolls to feed them for the whole day.

He climbed the stairs and remembered how guards dragged him up the steps.

Hadi Ali, 35, a hospital nurse, quietly watched men greeting each other and searching through pieces of papers on the ground for clues about the missing.

"I wanted to remember the bitter times I lived," Ali said about his five months in prison in 1997 for associating with people opposed to Saddam's regime.

"There's satisfaction in coming here."

SPACE.WIRE