TEHRAN -- An official in charge of prisoners of war affairs appealed to Iraq here Wednesday to release remaining Iranian soldiers who are still detained in that country's jails.

The Head of Office for Iranian POWs Affairs, Abbas-Ali Vakili said, "Tehran could prove with 'satisfactory justification' that some of its soldiers were still languishing in Iraqi prisons. "We are advising Iraqi officials to show goodwill which has increased recently toward Iran and set free the remaining prisoners of war held in that country."

Press in April cited Abdollah Najafi in charge of missings in action (MIAs) as saying that Tehran and Baghdad had exchanged 92 percent of their POWs. "The two neighboring countries have swapped 99,766 of their POWs since the end of the destructive war," said Najafi adding that "some of the Iranian prisoners in Iraq had either died or been martyred in captivity."

The issue of POWs and MIAs has been one of the major stumbling blocks to the normalization of ties between Tehran and Baghdad since they ended the war with a Cease-fire.

The Islamic Republic says some 2,500 of its forces are still held in Iraqi prisons and refutes Baghdad's claims that it holds nearly 30,000 Iraqi soldiers.

On Tuesday, 125 Iranians residing in Iraq voluntarily returned home via the southwestern Shalamcheh border checkpoint, Khuzestan Province.

The convoy, the fourth returning home, was made of 18 families that had been residing in Iraq during the years of the Iraqi-imposed war.

The return of refugees follows the agreement signed between Iran and Iraq to encourage the voluntary repatriation of nationals from both sides to be performed under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The refugees will be kept in quarantine before they are returned to their cities of domicile.

Some 6,000 Iraqi refugees have returned home on a voluntary basis over the past two months, while the Islamic Republic has had 600 nationals back home over the past month, said IRNA.