The SQAP-polytope was associated to quadratic assignment problems with a certain symmetric objective function structure by Rijal (1995) and Padberg and Rijal (1996). We derive a technique for investigating the SQAP-polytope that is based on projecting the (low-dimensional) polytope into a lower dimensional vector-space, where the vertices have a "more convenient" coordinate structure. We exploit this technique in order to prove conjectures by Padberg and Rijal on the dimension of the SQAP-polytope as well as on its trivial facets. Key words. quadratic assignment problem, symmetric model, polyhedral combinatorics AMS subject classifications. 90C09, 90C10, 90C27 PII. S1052623496310576