US Accused of Abusing and Beating Afghan Detainees

The US military prison torture scandal widened further yesterday as new evidence emerged of beatings and sexual abuse of detainees in army jails in Afghanistan.

An Afghan police colonel told reporters from the New York Times and Associated Press that he had been repeatedly beaten, stripped naked and threatened with dogs for nearly 40 days last year at several US-run bases in Afghanistan. He also accused American prison guards of sticking their fingers in his anus and taunting him sexually.

A spokesman for US forces said an investigation into the allegations was opened yesterday, but Human Rights Watch pointed out it had presented senior US officials in Afghanistan with a report in March alleging systematic physical abuse and sexual humiliation in military prisons.

The Afghan allegations come at a time when the Bush administration has been accused of creating conditions for the physical and sexual assaults on prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison by allowing the use of "stress and duress" techniques.

Private Lynndie England, one of the military police guards facing court martial after she appeared in photographs with naked Abu Ghraib inmates, yesterday insisted she was acting on orders from "persons in my chain of command".

"I was instructed by persons in higher rank to 'stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera', and they took pictures for PsyOps [psychological operations]," Private England told a Denver television station, KCNC-TV. "I didn't really ... want to be in any pictures."

In evidence to a Senate committee, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday defines prisoners in Iraq as "unlawful combatants" rather than prisoners of war but insists they were treated in a manner "consistent with" the Geneva conventions.

A Pentagon lawyer yesterday said that detainees in Afghanistan, like those in Guantanamo Bay, were not protected by the Geneva conventions, as they were not part of a uniformed regular army.

Sayed Nabi Siddiqui, an Afghan police colonel, told the New York Times he had been wrongly detained in July last year after reporting police corruption. He told the Associated Press that he was beaten every day for 22 days by about six to seven people, some American and some Afghan.

"They stood around me and put their fingers in my anus," he said. "They were asking very rude questions, like which animal did I like having sex with," he told the New York Times.

He also said he was made to kneel and dogs were brought into the cell and used to threaten him.

The US embassy in Kabul told the New York Times that a military investigation had been launched and quoted the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, as saying: "To the best of our knowledge this is the first time anyone in the military chain of command or the United States embassy has heard of this alleged mistreatment."