British detainee at Guantanamo alleges handcuff torture
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-01-02 09:03

A British detainee was reportedly tortured at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for reciting the Koran when talking was banned.

Moazzam Begg told lawyers he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin America in which a prisoner is suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut into his wrists, Britain's weekly Observer newspaper said.

Begg reportedly alleged that he had been shaven several times against his will and that a guard had said on one such occasion, "This is the part that really gets to you Muslims isn't it?"

Al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners wash before midday prayers at Camp X-Ray, the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A British detainee was reportedly tortured at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for reciting the Koran when talking was banned.[AFP/file]

Further allegations were made about treatment at both Guantanamo and the US base at Bagram, Afghanistan to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith when he visited Begg and another British prisoner, Richard Belmar.

Stafford Smith has drawn up a 30-page report on torture allegations from Begg and Belmar and sent it along with a letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Observer said.

In the letter, according to the newspaper, the lawyer said he heard "credible and consistent evidence that both men have been savagely tortured at the hands of the United States."

Begg had suffered not only physical abuse but "sexual abuse" which has had "mental health consequences", the letter reportedly said.

Begg, 36, was arrested in Pakistan in February 2002 and was among nine Britons known to have been detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Four of five Britons released in March, and subsequently freed upon return home, are suing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials for alleged torture and abuse.

A report released in December revealed that another Briton still detained at Guantanamo has claimed he was subjected to abuse and humiliation.

Martin Mubanga, 31, told a visiting Foreign Office official he was kept shackled for so long that he urinated on himself, and then was forced to clean up the mess, that an interrogator stood on his hair and that he was subjected to extremely hot temperatures.

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