The head of Iran's prisoner of war commission met with two Iraqi Cabinet ministers Saturday in a bid to glean information about thousands of Iranian POWs allegedly in Iraq, the official Iraqi News Agency reported.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf told Abdullah al-Najafi that the two states needed to ``speed up the closure of what remains from the POW and Missing-In-Action file,'' INA said.
The issue of POWs and missing persons remains a stumbling block to normalizing relations between the two neighbors.
Iraq has long maintained that it has released all Iranian prisoners captured in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. The countries accuse each other of hiding POWs and preventing visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to prisoner camps.
The ICRC representative in Baghdad, Manuel Bessler, told The Associated Press that his organization has had difficulty visiting POWs on both sides on a regular basis.
In April, Iran released 5,584 Iraqi POWs and Iraq freed three POWs and 316 Iranians it classified as civil law detainees in the largest exchange since 1990.
More than 1 million people were killed or wounded in the Iran-Iraq War.