FBI agents raised misgivings about US interrogators’ mistreatment of terror suspects detained in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay during the three years after September 11, but in some cases were slow to report it, a US Justice Department report says.

The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded today.

More than 7,000 people who should have been barred from buying guns were able to buy them in 2002 and 2003, according to a US Justice Department review.

US president George Bush said he was ‘‘plenty hot’’ to learn that student visas for two September 11 hijackers were delivered months after they flew planes into New York’s World Trade Centre.