Claims by a former prisoner at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay that he was tortured during his years in custody have sparked calls for an independent inquiry into Britain's role in the man's detention and extradition.
Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was freed from the US detention centre in Cuba on February 23 after seven years in custody, described in an interview published in Britain's The Mail on Sunday newspaper his ordeal in various prisons between his arrest and his transfer to Guantanamo Bay.
Mohamed told the paper that his worst months in custody were spent in a dark prison in Afghanistan, where he said he was shackled in uncomfortable positions for days on end and blasted with constant loud music which made sleep impossible.
Allegations of abuse in the "dark prison" surfaced in 2005 in a report by Human Rights Watch, based on accounts provided by lawyers for Mohamed and seven other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
"There's no question that the United States was the ring leaders in this whole scheme, but you cannot run a worldwide system of secret detention and torture without the assistance and acquiescence of other countries and it seems fairly clear that Britain was involved," Cori Crider, a lawyer representing Mohamed told Britian's Sky News.
"The question that you're rightly asking is: how great was the involvement? But that's exactly why we need an independent investigation and a public airing of the facts," she added.
Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian who came to Britain as a teenager, was accused of plotting al-Qaeda attacks in the United States, but war crimes charges against him were dropped last year.
He was arrested in Pakistan on April 10, 2002 while trying to leave the country on a false passport.
Britain's High Court, ruling in a case brought by Mohamed's lawyers last year, said there was no evidence of where he was held until May 2004, when he was transferred to Bagram in Afghanistan.
The British government accepted, however, that Mohamed had established an arguable case that he was "detained unlawfully and incommunicado at the 'dark prison' near Kabul where he was subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States."
Speaking to Sky on Sunday, British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith insisted that the British government was not involved in torture.
However questions about the government's involved in the extraordinary rendition of Mohamed and others like him remain.
Mohamed says he was taken to Morocco on a secret CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency) rendition flight in July, 2002.
He claims he was tortured during 18 months in Morocco, including having his penis cut.
In January 2004, he says, he was taken to the prison in Afghanistan, where he says he saw light only when guards carrying flashlights brought trays of food - food that often made him ill and caused him to lose weight rapidly, he says.
Mohamed was moved out of the dark prison to another prison at Bagram air base in May 2004.
In September, he was transferred to Guantanamo.
APTN