Koran desecrated, claim Guantanamo detainees

PAKISTANIS freed from Guantanamo Bay claimed they saw US interrogators throw, tear and stand on copies of Islam's holy book, and one former detainee said naked women sat on prisoners' chests during questioning.

The Pentagon denied the accusations and said al-Qaida training manuals instruct prisoners to make such false charges.

The men acknowledged that they were aware of the international furore caused by previous reports about Koran desecrations. Such reports triggered protests across the Islamic world and deadly riots in Afghanistan last month.

Seventeen Pakistanis were freed on Monday from a jail in this eastern city, where they had been held since their release nine months ago from the US prison for terror in Cuba.

A Pakistani official said each had been "declared innocent by America" and cleared of involvement in terrorism by Pakistani intelligence.

The claims of the men, who spoke to reporters after joyful family reunions outside the jail in Lahore, could not be confirmed independently. The Associated Press briefly interviewed six of the men separately, sometimes interrupted by Pakistani officials who appeared eager to keep the men from making the allegations.

All six said they were arrested in Afghanistan after going there to fight the US-led coalition that ousted the hard-line Taliban regime in late 2001 for harbouring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network.

"During interrogation, whenever I would make a reference to the Koran they would hit me in the face with a copy. They would tear it into pieces. They would tell me that Koran teaches us terrorism," said Salahuddin Ayubi, a 31-year-old from Rajanpur in eastern Pakistan. Hafiz Ahsan, a 26-year-old Lahore tailor who said he was arrested three years' ago in southern Afghanistan during the jihad against America - claimed he saw interrogators stand on the Koran and throw the book in urine.

He claimed inmates staged a hungerstrike in protest, and were then tortured with electric shocks.

Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman, said inmates at Guantanamo are treated humanely and there are "adequate standard operating procedures in place to ensure detainee religious faith is respected".

He said al-Qaida taught detainees to make false abuse allegations. A Pentagon report released this month confirmed five cases in which US guards at Guantanamo mishandled the Koran, including incidents in which one copy of the book was splashed with urine and another was stepped on.

The report concluded that none of the guards flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet - an explosive allegation that surfaced in a Newsweek magazine report. The magazine later retracted the report.

The freed detainees said they had learned about the controversy from other inmates and prison officials.

Many Pakistanis went to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, and scores ended up in Guantanamo. Pakistani officials say as many as 11 Pakistanis are among the 540 detainees still held. They say 67 Pakistanis have been freed from Guantanamo, and almost all have been held in Pakistani custody since their return.

Tahir Ashrafi, a religious affairs adviser for Punjab province, said the 17 men had been cleared by Pakistani intelligence agencies after thorough interrogation and "have not been found to be involved in any kind of terrorist activity".