He looked. He saw nothing. He exonerated.

But one of the two FIFA officials who cleared Iraq of allegations that soccer players were tortured in 1997 says he does not doubt the credibility of other Iraqi athletes who are now coming forward with more allegations of abuse.

"I can't say they are lying," said Rustum Baker, a FIFA representative from Qatar. "I just didn't see anything."

Baker and Paul Mony Samuel, a soccer official from Malaysia, spent two days in Baghdad in the service of FIFA, which had responded to reports that some players were punished after Iraq lost a World Cup qualifying game to Kazakhstan in 1997. They talked to Iraqi soccer officials and coaches, and some but not all -- 12 -- of the players. None of them said they were tortured, and the investigators examined them for physical evidence of abuse.

Their findings from the two-day investigation have been ridiculed by Iraqi athletes and other exiles familiar with the consequences for speaking out in the police state.

"Do they think a player inside Iraq has the guts and capability to talk against Uday?" said Entifadh Qanbar, who runs the Washington office of the Iraqi National Congress, a coalition of opposition groups. "They should know better. That's like going to streets of Chicago in the 1930s and asking the shop owners, 'Do you like Al Capone?' "

When asked if he thought players had the ability to tell him the truth, Baker said: "We're supposed to respect all people. We cannot say that they couldn't tell us the truth."

Sharar Haydar, who played for the Iraqi national team at the time, says he missed that game with injury and was not interviewed by FIFA officials. But he says players were, in fact, tortured after that game. He expects more players on that team to come forward if Saddam Hussein is removed from power.

"Don't tell me about the FIFA (investigation)," he says. "But all the truth is going to come out after Saddam goes. I want to see (FIFA president Sepp) Blatter's face afterwards, when the truth comes out and everybody is able to talk. I want to see what he is going to say then."