NEW YORK. Feb 15: US federal authorities are investigating senior American military officers over corruption allegations in the effort to rebuild Iraq, The New York Times said in a report on Sunday, citing interviews with senior government officials and court documents.

The newspaper said that “the authorities are examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq” during which reports of widespread corruption were not investigated or were overlooked.

Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure.

In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt Col Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry, the Times said.

The newspaper report says: “It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators.

Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run.

As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.”

Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone, the nerve centre of the United States government’s presence in Iraq.

Mr Stoffel, who gave investigators information about the office where

Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle worked, was deemed credible enough that he was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his information, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials and Mr Stoffel’s lawyer, John H. Quinn Jr There is no evidence that his death was related to his allegations of corruption.

Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to reconstruction

in Iraq, yet most of them involved private contractors or mid-level officials. The current inquiry is aiming at higher-level officials, according to investigators involved in the case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections between those officials and figures in the other cases.

Although Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle were military officers, they worked in a civilian contracting office.