The Justice Department is examining the involvement of Central Intelligence Agency officers and contract employees in three suspicious deaths of detainees, two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

One of the victims of suspected abuse was an Iraqi major general in the Republican Guard, who died in November 2003, several days after he was questioned at an interrogation center in western Iraq by C.I.A. officers, according to a senior law enforcement official.

In November 2003, the official said, a detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad died, apparently as he was being questioned by a C.I.A. officer and a linguist who was hired by the agency as a contractor…The agency official said the detainee was not touched, but “slumped over” during the interrogation. The C.I.A. officers who interviewed General Mohush also denied mistreating him.

In a third case, in June 2003, a detainee in Afghanistan died during questioning by an independent contractor working for the C.I.A., a case in which the agency official did not rule out mistreatment.

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Another area of possible wrongdoing by the agency disclosed Wednesday relates to requests by C.I.A. personnel to military authorities at Abu Ghraib prison to hold suspects without listing them on the prison’s rolls, according to newly available passages of an internal military report on abuses in Iraqi prisons.

The practice was routine, according to a passage in the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba…

Detainees kept off the prisoner roster at Abu Ghraib were referred to as “ghost detainees,” the report said. In one instance, the report found, a group of six to eight prisoners “was moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross survey team.”