Of the seven soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company charged in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Spc. Megan Ambuhl has provoked the least publicity, scrutiny and outrage.

Megan Ambuhl in a yearbook photo. Related articles FBI disavows knowledge of prisoner abuse in Iraq. See an interactive report by the AP on the seven guards charged with abusing prisoners in Iraq.

That's because, her attorney said, there's no evidence she did anything wrong.

"They don't have a case against her. They really don't," said attorney Harvey J. Volzer of Washington, D.C. "She's not in any of the photographs you've seen or in any of the ones you haven't. She's not mentioned in any of the statements of doing anything other than being there. She's being charged because everybody on the night shift was being charged."

On another front in the scandal, attorneys for another of the accused MPs, Pfc. Lynndie England, said Army investigators repeatedly ignored her requests for an attorney, forced her to sign waivers of her rights and omitted key details from her statements.

Attorney Giorgio Ra'Shadd of Denver said that investigators in Iraq and later in the United States continued to question England despite her insistence that she had a lawyer and wanted him to be present.

Ra'Shadd, who was fired yesterday from England's legal team, and Rose Mary Zapor, another of England's lawyers, said earlier yesterday they would seek to have England's statements suppressed. One reason, they said, was that investigators forced her to give statements without counsel present.

As for Ambuhl, a lab technician in her civilian life in the northern Virginia suburb of Herndon, Volzer maintains she was at the wrong place at the wrong time "because there was nowhere else for her to be."

"I wish there had been a back door there, but there wasn't."

A spokesman for coalition forces in Baghdad said in an e-mail that they would not discuss the cases involving Ambuhl, England, 21, of Fort Ashby, W.Va., or Spc. Sabrina Harman, 26, of Lorton, Va. Unlike the four accused male MPs from the Maryland-based unit, none of the women has had charges referred to a court-martial.

Of the females, only Ambuhl has had an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury to determine if evidence warrants a court-martial. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, is expected to decide by early summer if she should face a court-martial on charges of dereliction of duty and conspiracy. At the Article 32 hearing, two other charges were dropped and not recommended to Sanchez.

England and Harman have yet to have their Article 32 hearings.

Unlike England, Harman and others from their company, Ambuhl, 29, does not appear in any of the widely publicized pictures from inside the prison that show some of the accused MPs with naked prisoners, some placed in humiliating poses including piled in pyramids, intimidated by Army working dogs, forced to masturbate or posed in positions simulating homosexual acts.

Moreover, Volzer maintained that Ambuhl doesn't appear in any of the other pictures of abuse that are part of the military investigation but have not been publicly released. Volzer said that he has all the pictures.

Additionally, she is not mentioned by name in the lightning-rod Army report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, leaked to the media last month, that describes abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Nor is she mentioned in statements to military criminal investigators made by Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits, 24, of Hyndman, Bedford County, which likewise were leaked and widely publicized earlier this month. In those statements, Sivits points the finger at the five fellow MPs for abusive acts.

Volzer said that Ambuhl hadn't been offered a plea bargain like Sivits, who pleaded guilty at a special court-martial and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a year in military prison, demotion to the rank of private and discharge from the Army for bad conduct. Even if they had offered Ambuhl a similar deal, Volzer said, it wouldn't have made a difference.

"She's not going to plead guilty because she's not guilty of doing anything," said Volzer, a Peters native.

Because of that, Volzer's defense of Ambuhl isn't expected to be that she was following orders of superiors, which is expected to be the tack taken by other defendants. Instead, it will be that she is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Rather than abusing prisoners, Volzer maintained, Ambuhl treated them humanely, in one case getting an inhaler for a detainee who was having trouble breathing. The statements of prisoners to military investigators will bear out her noncomplicity in abuse, he said.

He said that if Ambuhl is court-martialed, he's not worried about getting the conspiracy charge dismissed because "you need to prove an agreement but you can't prove an agreement by her mere presence." The dereliction of duty charge will be trickier, he said, "because it's so wide open you can plug anything into it."

Volzer said he will seek a change of venue from Iraq, claiming that a fair proceeding by a military tribunal would not be possible because of influence by superior officers there, like Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the occupation military command.

"Absolutely there was command influence," Volzer said. "All of these people at the top of the chain of command have prejudged guilt or innocence and that's been transmitted to the troops. How many times has Kimmitt said they're guilty as sin?

"And if you want to go above him you can go to the heads of every military branch who said the same at the [congressional] hearings. It goes all the way to commander-in-chief and his wife."

England is most notorious for a photo in which she is leading a naked, grimacing detainee on a leash. She is charged with assaulting Iraqi detainees on multiple occasions; conspiring with Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr., 36, a Whitehall native now of Uniontown, to mistreat prisoners; committing an indecent act; and committing acts "prejudicial to good order and discipline" and of a nature "to bring discredit upon the armed forces."

Before Ra'Shadd was dropped from England's legal team due to his own legal problems, he said investigators pressured England into signing forms in which she waived her right against self-incrimination and to have an attorney present while she was questioned.

He said they questioned her in January about events at Abu Ghraib, and again in April and May after she was transferred to Fort Bragg, N.C., because she is pregnant with Graner's child. The six other MPs remain in Iraq.

"[She and other soldiers] were rousted out of bed at 3 a.m. and questioned [in January]. She reminded them, 'I have a lawyer, I want to speak to him,"' he said. "They told her, 'He's not in Iraq, too bad' and they went on questioning her for 12 hours."

Ra'Shadd also contended that investigators would not allow England to include her assertions that military intelligence and other government agents ordered her to pose for photos with Iraqi detainees.