BERLIN - An international grouping of lawyers filed a lawsuit calling on German prosecutors to investigate outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for allegedly sanctioning torture.

An international grouping of lawyers filed a lawsuit calling on German prosecutors to investigate outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, pictured August 2006, for allegedly sanctioning torture.[AFP]

The 220-page suit is being brought on behalf of 11 former Iraqi detainees of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and one Saudi currently held at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The suit was filed to Germany's federal prosecutor Monika Harms at her offices in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe.

German law allows the pursuit of warcrimes cases regardless of where they originate in the world.

A Pentagon spokesman dismissed the lawsuit as "frivolous."

A similar attempt to prosecute Rumsfeld in Germany in 2004 was rejected, but the German lawyer representing the detainees, Wolfgang Kaleck, said he was confident the complaint would be taken up now.

"We failed two years ago because there was an ongoing investigation in the United States, but it is now clear that there is no chance of prosecuting high-ranking officials in the US," Kaleck told a press conference in Berlin called to present the complaint.

"We are not expecting that Rumsfeld will appear in a court, but we are hoping investigators will begin looking into the case," he said.

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